I want to be clear that I agree with you and I am not providing this explanation as an excuse for Apple, but merely as an explanation for what might have happened with the timeline: first they announced they were doing this, a bunch of us said "no this is the first step towards breaking e2e entirely", and THEN this year there was the high-profile issue--note that I am not saying it is a new issue, but merely that it was suddenly a high-profile one that actually caused a lot of press and backlash--with the laws in the UK and/or Australia or whatever that showed we were all correct, and so I'd guess even the most ardent "I am smarter than everyone" person at Apple finally went "ah damn I was wrong".
No, as I didn't even know which country it was from for sure, right? ;P But I went ahead and typed "UK encryption" into the Hacker News search and it all popped up from the last few months; the first hit, from a month ago, was even about Apple actively scrambling to push back on it (lending even more support to my point).
