If (as many people have suggested) Apple's intention in suddenly devoting significant resources into PWAs (after completely ignoring them for years) was to avoid app store regulation, it makes perfect sense that when they failed to stave off regulation in the EU Apple would no longer have a motivation for investing into them within the EU.

Additionally, even if Apple is still looking at PWAs as a way of staving off regulation in the EU, it still makes perfect sense that Apple is running a cost-benefit analysis on PWAs being open to other browsers. PWAs on iOS are significantly limited even after Apple's increase in support. Supporting PWAs just well enough to stave off regulation while keeping them locked down so that other browsers can not extend them or push capabilities further is entirely in Apple's interest.

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My take is that Apple as a company would prefer not to be working on PWAs at all. But that's not really an option, because both the EU and the US are looking at regulating the app store. The next best option is to have PWAs be a serviceable but ultimately inferior option for offline-only and privacy-preserving apps (and in fact many of the APIs Apple supports are entirely unusable for offline-only apps, although to be fair that's probably more Google's fault than Apple's). Apple may very well have thought the option of a semi-supported but ultimately inferior, controlled PWA experience was off the table in the EU; or they thought that with the app store opening up they could get away with killing the platform for EU users entirely. In either case, they now seem to believe they can keep PWAs locked down to only support Safari capabilities. Maybe they're right, I'm sure Apple has more access to regulators to ask these questions than anyone else here does.

And so none of this is incompatible with the notion that Apple wants to kill PWAs. The idea that a company can completely ignore a technology for years and years and years, and then suddenly out of the blue as soon as regulation gets suggested start pouring resources into their browser and openly arguing in court, "see, you don't need to regulate us, we have a browser" -- and we're supposed to believe that this means that Apple is suddenly on board with the technology and that they don't have ulterior motives or that their motives wouldn't shift back if the threat of regulation went away.

That is just silly. Apple has had literal years to both clarify with regulators what the browser regulations would mean and to build APIs for PWAs that Microsoft and Google have been perfectly capable of creating. And in light of their last-minute scrambling, the most likely and reasonable interpretation is that Apple thought they could get away with killing off PWAs now that they were no longer useful for avoiding app store regulation, a bunch of people screamed about it, regulators reached out, and suddenly Apple had a (partial) change of heart.

Note, of course, Apple has no timeline or plans or announcements about when (or if) PWA APIs are going to stop being 1st-party privileged and exclusive to Safari, despite the fact that Apple has known that this regulation would be coming for multiple years. Which does seem to conflict a little bit with the narrative that Apple is all-aboard with PWAs as a technology and that they've been investing into them as a long-term strategy or commitment to the web, but what do I know?

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But I really, genuinely do not see what the past 4 years prove other than that Apple's motivations about the web can change on a dime the moment that regulation enters the picture. And I think that's really revealing, and I think it says something about Apple's commitment to the web that it took the threat of regulation to make them care at all about the web as a platform, and I think it really says something about Apple's motivations that the moment that regulation went through anyway, Apple suddenly reverted back to its previous stance on PWAs and was comfortable throwing all of the PWA investment of the past 4 years out the window.

I very honestly do not understand how people can look at these series of events and say, "this proves that Apple cares about the web." We're looking at the same timeline, but it's like you're reading it in a different language than I am.