> That hundreds of millions of users took years to notice should be an indication this whole thing worked pretty well IMO.

People absolutely have been noticing, this has been a very popular and long running issue. It took years for Apple to admit it, not for people to notice.

I think this could have been better handled by throttling according to the actual condition of the battery, rather than controlling it via software updates. The former seems reasonable, the latter is pretty shady. (Maybe this is actually what is happening and the press has confused what is going on.)