My guess would be that it was personally advocated for by someone who has enough influence within Apple to make it happen. Possibly someone on the hardware team

My guess would be that it was personally advocated for by someone who has enough influence within Apple to make it happen. Possibly someone on the hardware team, as I hear that the people developing the Apple Silicon processors run linux on them while they're in development. This used to be one of the best things about Apple when Steve Jobs was still running the company: you'd get a bunch of features that a purely profit-focussed "rational business" would never approve, just because Steve wanted them. And I suspect Apple still has some of that culture.