Oh yeah, the thing with Apple, 3rd party stores and sideloading is a good example of this. Whenever the EU announced it everyone jumped into conclusions saying there would be sideloading while I kept saying they could get away with a few tweaks to the Enterprise program just to get bashed by people.
Now here we are today with the new iOS and there's no real sideloading for anyone, simply a special Enterprise certificate that allows for 3rd party stores, Apple still having to vet every single application that goes into those stores an attempt at retaliation that almost lead to the end of PWAs (that are commonly used to get around Apple's bullshit policies).