There are a lot of anti-Apple arguments a passionate critic might leverage, but claiming that Safari is "notoriously outdated and incompatible with the modern web" is just foolish. It is laughable nonsense.
For some opinion pieces you can search for "Safari is the new Internet Explore"
It is whispering to a very specific audience.
And through all of this, the most remarkable thing is that Safari is hugely over represented among web visitors, both from iOS and Macs. It's almost like providing an extremely fast, light, energy efficient, feature rich browser encourages its use.
At the time, developers complained bitterly that Apple didn't provide a native SDK, nor did they support Flash or Java web apps.
In 2021, mobile Safari is good enough to run Amazon Luna game streaming, so you can actually stream fairly demanding games like Far Cry 6 to an iPhone. However, Safari (and, to a lesser extent, Firefox) is far behind in terms of feature parity with Chrome for implementing Google's vision of Progressive Web Apps. In particular, Apple has announced that they don't intend to support a number of web APIs (Bluetooth, NFC, etc.) for privacy and security (and presumably business) reasons.
1: Some kind of guarantee they're not going to randomly purge my assets/data to get some disk space back. I want to provide a good offline experience and not require a network connection. 2: Notifications, which has been requested for Safari every year for a decade. This is willful neglect and not esoteric new-in-chrome functionality or a security risk.
Apple did finally move WebRTC over from regular Safari to WebApp last year (Not every feature in mobile Safari is available as a WebApp). Finally! This opens up new potential. If they did the two above I'd be reasonably satisfied with the platform's capability.
I understand the critique about their app store policy. But if you don‘t like their policy, don‘t build a „business“ depending on it. Or find a way around it. But stop crying in public and play the victim. Be creative, just like the people who invented the things our businesses rely on.