A feature which, incidentally, was adopted in limited form by Apple 6 years later in iPhone Safari, which to this day detects strings of digits that look like phone numbers and makes them into links to call the number (without any [obvious?] distinction from normal links, even), without any backlash whatsoever. The email app does that plus dates and addresses. Admittedly it's not quite the same and circumstances differ, but looking back, that IE backlash really looks like an overreaction.

(I also remember reading, many years ago, a very angry post about how you couldn't fully remove Internet Explorer from Windows, because various OS components used it as a library to render their UIs, and how evil and anticompetitive it was for Microsoft to intermingle their products that way. Oh, how times change...)

Difference is that there's competition in the smartphone space and I can grab an Android / Jolla / Ubuntu phone where I can change my default browser. Apple did not have several years of monopoly behind it by burning away competition and never managed to become a monopoly.

There's a reason governments do not like monopolies and the markets cannot fix themselves by getting rid of them since the monopolies are not playing by the market's rules anymore.

And crucially, Apple is only using data detectors to create linkages with iOS internal services that aren't otherwise readily accessible to web sites: creating calendar items, dialing the phone, etc. They're not using it, as Microsoft did, to promote their own web sites and services.

(Yes, I know you can technically access the phone with a tel: link. But very few web sites do this!)

Plenty of people are still unhappy about Apple imposing those policies as well. It's just that there's nothing that can be done about them.