Someone develops a webapp, I can make my own phone and anyone who wants to continue using all the webapps they were using in Safari on their iPhone can come over and do that in the browser on my phone.
People develop native apps for the iPhone, and suddenly leaving the iPhone means leaving behind all those apps.
It sounds crazy but at the time the wild west of apps on the desktop meant that the user experience was pretty poor and allowed malware to explode.
It has been said that Microsoft's failure to fix these issues is really what drove web application development. No one realized a viable alternative was to lock down the device to a single store/publisher and then take a 30% cut.
Now that WebApps probably could replace nearly all native apps, it's in Apple's best interest to not fully support PWAs, WASM, etc. because the app store is so lucrative.
Nah, what drove web development was 100% ease of deployment. No more dealing with installers that don't work and people who don't know how to use them, the browser is already there; no more dealing with the pain of rolling out updates, you push to your own server and it's done. And you don't have to care about Windows stack vs Mac stack with completely different teams, a few css/js tweaks and you're done. Sun understood the issue and tried to put up a fight with their Java Web Start, but in the end the JRE still required an installer, with all the related issues. MS eventually got something like that working seamlessly, but it was 15 years too late.
The whole "we can fix a bug and deploy new version to everyone while still on the phone with the customer who reported the problem" thing was just a bait.
There is no need to be always cynically focused on "evil money", often it's just pragmatism.