Unfortunately there is a lot of really wild speculation going on that places a lot of the thinking into “upper management” and ignores the realities of engineer

Unfortunately there is a lot of really wild speculation going on that places a lot of the thinking into “upper management” and ignores the realities of engineering and production. IIRC - This is the first time the battery attachment method has been changed since they were made to be fully enclosed units. It could really be as simple as eng/Production standardising battery attachment tech for unibody enclosures and the switch to m1 was the first meaningful redesign where that could have happened. This is underlined by Apple’s “repairability scores” being mostly random - it seems that apple just doesn’t spend a lot of R&D time obsessing about repairability tweaks in bump-releases, especially if they’re going to get in the way of their vision for the device.