Because nothing sells DRM-free content like making it more difficult to play.
And it goes without saying that the sight of a single developer torpedoing a popular project over the objections of both other developers and users is an awesome commercial for open source.
And yes, seeing apple fanboys jump on this guy because he wants his rights honoured is pretty sickening.
It doesn't seem like VLC requires copyright assignment. If it did then the maintainers could implicitly or explicitly relicense VLC for the app store. Since Remi holds the copyright to whatever source code he wrote, he has a right to see that the source code isn't used against his wishes. Maybe he has a philosophical objection to Apple or the app store. Maybe he's just doing it "for the lulz". Whatever it is, it's honestly none of anyone else's business.
And that article is terribly one-sided. The only facts that matter are that Remi holds the copyright to some of VLC's source code and that the app store ToS is possibly incompatible with the GPL. Anything else (motives, etc) is a value judgement.
So, your point is that developers should only enforce their rights when it will be popular?
I was singularly unimpressed by the blog author's focus on blaming the developer for making things inconvenient for others. Well, insisting on your rights is quite often inconvenient for others. And it's not like it should be surprising. This sort of conflict was inevitable given the terms of the App Store and the GPL.