Is Apple taking steps to purposefully blocking open stuff, or are they just pointedly ignoring it and continuing to develop new hardware? I am genuinely asking, I don't know myself.

edit: speaking mostly about macOS here, mobile OSes are much more locked down

I had a bad experience with my Lenovo laptop. It had a firmware issue that caused the trackpad to become unresponsive after suspend and Lenovo never fixed it.

Made the laptop miserable to use, so I went for a MacBook instead which wouldn't have such an obvious issue be unfixed because Apple has so few SKUs to support.

Also went for it in part because I do not like Windows and macOS typically would save me when Linux support was lacking. Just had to hope for a quick port of Asahi Linux to become (unfortunately didn't happen for my M3, but thankfully it's been progressing recently).

I think you might be forgetting where you are. They call it "Hacker News" for a reason.