In a better world, this whole issue would have been averted by the first-level support escalating it to the supervisor who would have used common sense and the liberties of his leadership position.
It’s not. There’s an appeals process staffed by humans. He used it. This is the result.
Unless I’ve missed something, there’s no indication raising a stink helped in this case. The original article mentioned that he’d appealed the rejection with Apple which was still pending. This is the result of that appeal. In all likelihood this was a trigger-happy reviewer whose decision was always going to be reversed on appeal. Had the appeal failed, then that would have been newsworthy.
Apple has other problems, but it’s not difficult to get human attention from Apple when they reject your application. Use the appeals process; you always get to a human. I think perhaps you’re mixing it up with Google? They are notorious for leaving developers stranded with automated rejections without any route to speaking to a human.
Of course, there's no way to know. But do you 100% honestly believe reaching the frontpage of HN yesterday had nothing to do with the appeal being accepted today?
He filed the appeal, he didn’t wait for the result. The result has now come in. It’s a massive assumption to attribute that result to media attention.
Perhaps if your only experience of the Apple review process is hearing about it when it pops up on Hacker News then it’s easy to make the assumption that the media did this, because the media is always involved in those cases. But this is what happens without the media getting involved as well.
Not sure I agree that it guaranteed it but I do agree with you that it very likely had an impact - it would have come up on someone's radar.