What is really amusing in hindsight was the number of people willing to pile on and argue that this was in fact totally reasonable of Apple to be doing and that we shouldn't be surprised or upset at all about it.
Exactly, while I had doubts about this accusation on Apple, I was surprised about how many people were okay with it. These people (defenders of Apple) vote, but they're not even likely to be Billionaires (it's not wrong to be a Billionaire if you play fair). Why do they defend such an awful practice if it actually happened and wasn't fake news?
(do you mean "didn't really happen"?)
Controversialists work like that. There is no position in defence of power that people won't argue for, and have a little circle of people cheering them on.
I messed up (just edited the comment to correct), what I mean is in a hypothetical scenario where Apple really did this, why would you defend them?
Stripe and other modern payment gateway makes pricing simple, but it's far from simple behind the scene. Most people on HN are probably using credit card for App Store, so it's easy to overlook that App Store offers different kinds of APMs: carrier payment[1], local wallet, stored value card, and local payment services[2]. I don't think Stripe supports half or even third of what App Store supports.
I've worked on local integration for few countries for different kind of payment methods. In some payment method they simply don't refund your fee. In some cases where currency conversion happens it's not possible to refund using the exact rate the charge was made. In some cases the fee is prohibitively high (e.g. 12% for carrier payment). In many cases there are contract fees, connection fee, infrastructure ("nah you have to have your own server cage and a direct fiber line from us") fee and many more. This, plus CDN, maintenance and everything, is one of the reasons why I don't think 30% is outrageous and will probably found it acceptable if they don't refund this fee, taking operational costs involved into account.