Look, I get you hate apple and desperately want to find fault with everything they do. I agree they are a bunch of greedy bastards that try to squeeze as much money out if their customers as they can, but this just isn’t one of the ways they do it.

The fuckers sold us devices that worked perfectly for years until they sent firmware updates to slow them down

This slow-down only triggers after the device already had a brown-out. That is: it has to at least crash once due to a worn out battery.

“The brakes on my car worked fine for years and now they suddenly don’t work anymore”. Batteries are a consumable. They wear out. Phones were crashing due to it. They pushed an update that ensured the devices remained usable instead of crashing under load.

Could they have communicated it better? Yes. Was it the right solution from a technical point of view? Also yes.