They block competent repairman? Or they ask money for competent repair?
Apple also threatens you with lawyers if you host or share schematics for repairing products. The new repair partner program from Apple is also a joke and created to appear they are trying to fix the problem.
Any merchant of quality products would suffer greatly if everyone is allowed to sell stuff in its name.
And nobody curses Ford's name when they go to a crappy shop and spend $2 on a new headlight that fails in a week. That's the shop's fault.
Nobody is saying anyone can call their junk an "official apple product". Why would this not be the same as the car scenario? If you don't want to risk issues, don't go to sketchy repair shops.
So what? Apple's interests don't matter, unlike its customers'.
Besides that, most Apple phones since 2016 or so are water resistant.
Does depend on chips being available and some knowledge on how to diagnose the damages (e.g.: board schematics).
Here's an example of new age Macbook pro's dying from little water ingress (design oversight). And a combination of knowledge and a simple chip can fix your nearly write off Macbook. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jahtu1_idVU
Apple loves to say that their products are so expensive and complicated that manual repairs just aren't worth doing. But observably, in the real world, even with all of the crap Apple puts in front of repair shops to slow them down, that isn't true. Third-party repairpeople still manage to regularly beat Apple's prices.
For most manufactures the incentives now is to minimize repairability. Increasing the repair cost.
Having some regulation in place to limit repairability prevention may tip the scale a bit towards repairing.