> Sad to hear that "raise a stink on HN" is one of the only ways to catch an actual human's live attention at a mega corp.

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.