What Apple is forced to allow now is already practice with Android phones. So we are really not talking about something new and risky, this is well-established technology.
We don't know how NFC is implemented on iOS. It could be tightly bound with the iOS Secure Enclave and then it's NOT "well-established technology" since Android uses different architecture(s).
The law has a provision for this case, but I highly doubt there is a technical reason for not opening NFC on iOS.
Yeah, this would definitely be a "show your work" situation if Apple said it wasn't possible.
Biometric authentication is tied to the Secure Enclave as well. There’s no technical reason that Apple couldn’t provide APIs to access it like they have for other sensitive operations.
Really? You can't imagine a single reason why using the Secure Enclave for NFC and credit card storage, usage and validation might be more complicated and risky than the authentication API? (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/localauthenticatio...)
Who said anything about new and risky? Credit cards are privacy nightmares and they're well established.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the android alternative to apple pay has all the privacy costs of just using credit cards.