The problem is that it unnecessarily tarnished the people pushing for a union into the conspiracy theorist bucket, and so delegitimizing any actual valid points

The problem is that it unnecessarily tarnished the people pushing for a union into the conspiracy theorist bucket, and so delegitimizing any actual valid points that they might otherwise have. They’re also ostensibly meant to be selling these products so should be up to date on the platform security, enough to know what is, and what is not, possible. It’s not unreasonable that they don’t understand the technical details, but they should be able to say “apple says thing X is protected by system Y, and no researchers have found any flaw in that”. Also this is apple store employees - the number of devices apple makes is tiny, and so knowing how such things work over that small a set of items is a perfectly reasonable thing to expect. If you were at some big box retailer (target, asda, etc) then I would be more forgiving about not knowing product details because at that scale it’s unreasonable to expect any employee to know all of the details of all of the items.