Like you say, there’s no way to know for certain. But I 100% honestly believe this was the likely outcome regardless of any media attention. I’ve appealed ple

Like you say, there’s no way to know for certain. But I 100% honestly believe this was the likely outcome regardless of any media attention. I’ve appealed plenty of dumb Apple decisions in the past and this is the normal outcome when there’s no media attention at all. He filed the appeal, he didn’t wait for the result. The result has now come in. It’s a massive assumption to attribute that result to media attention. Perhaps if your only experience of the Apple review process is hearing about it when it pops up on Hacker News then it’s easy to make the assumption that the media did this, because the media is always involved in those cases. But this is what happens without the media getting involved as well.