That's not really how the process was supposed to work. Apple has had a lot of discussions with the EC over the past year about this law and its implementation.
This is common and the goal is to help the company figure out how to implement it.
However, from the EU side, it seemed as if Apple completely misunderstood what the discussions with the EU were for.
Apple was mainly focused on trying to lobby against all restrictions, not realizing the EU already made up their mind. The EU was trying to prepare Apple, but instead Apple dragged their feet, remained in denial, and were then suddenly surprised that yes, indeed, they really can't lobby their way out of compliance.
It's not the first and won't be the last time that American business make this mistake. It is of course hard to overcome your context, especially if you don't even see it, or refuse to take it serious.
On the other hand, I understand the process isn't supposed to be fast, but as a consumer it looks like it takes so much time. At least the regulators are willing to hint at where the discussion will be going instead of keeping it secret for a year just for an effect of surprise. If the dust settles in three years, I get the feeling the market will have half moved on to the next big thing and Apple will already have ripped most of their transgressions' benefits.
On the third hand, I can't deny some amount of schadenfreude looking at Apple having to deal with the same "do the work first, we'll judge if it meets our review standard afterwards" treatment as they do to developers.
PS: the weirdest part to me is, looking at this year's WWDC lack of bigger features, it's obvious Apple had to use significant resource to deal with the EU requirements, the APIs for alternate browsers for instance didn't come by magic. And obviously the replacement of the default apps on the lock screen is also in line with the DMA.
Why then play it dumb when it costs them so much to do needless back and forths.