Just like Apple's 3-months free trial for the Apple Music service, keeping the Webkit-only PWAs were going to be seen as anticompetitive by Apple's opponents.

Just like Apple's 3-months free trial for the Apple Music service, keeping the Webkit-only PWAs were going to be seen as anticompetitive by Apple's opponents. Making the change early is a strategy to exploit Apple's opponents into loudly decrying how important and useful PWAs are - and that removing PWAs is the true, evil, anti-competitive strategy. (With all of their typical exaggeration, in reality we know PWAs are a limited-use feature.) In short, Apple played the useful idiots into being their cheerleaders and provided Apple exactly what they needed to maintain this feature. It didn't even take an "open letter" from "Taylor Swift" to "Tim Cook" this time. tl,dr: Apple exploits anti-apple rhetoric to get their way, again.