I worked on the buy-side. I would make this assumption 100% of the time, 100%. Every single time I have seen a company ignore stuff like this, it has bitten them in the end. To flip this on it's head, I have also never seen a management team under pressure for failing to do something like this.
The weird thing about your viewpoint is that it gives the perception of capitalism without actually understanding anything about how businesses function. It is like the pro-capitalist government employee's understanding of capitalism. It accepts capitalism but also accepts that capitalism is evil...it is a very weird viewpoint (you also see this in the ESG departments of large fund managers...people who hate capitalism, view it as inherently unfair...but work at a fund manager, it is very 2020s).
But to spell it out: if you do not respect stakeholders other than shareholders, your business will die because no-one needs you. Your shareholders needing you is not why a business exists. A business exists because it creates value for other people. One of the biggest problems today is that corporate leaders do not understand this, and they end up losing shareholders massive amounts of money. But it is important to be very clear: Tim Cook is a wage worker, executives are wage workers, they are not business owners, they do not act like business owners, their aim is not to maximise shareholder value, their aim is to maximise their wealth. If there is ownership, it is a dual share class dictatorship, it isn't an alignment of interests.
The big problem with China is that, whether you sign deals with the govt or not, the govt needs to have direct control over businesses in order to maintain political control. We are talking about a country where large businesses have CCP officials inside the business, the red phone to the CCP in the CEO's office...business is politics, AAPL doing this deal means they are part of the CCP. The CCP don't care about your shareholders, they don't care about your employees or customers, their aim is to stay in govt and die at an old age in their bed, not violently hanging from a lamppost. That is why the govt heavily favours large businesses, that is why they have done deals with large US tech companies (MSFT is the other one, MSFT are neck deep in Chinese politics now) but it won't work.
I actually know people who are very familiar with the thinking on this at AAPL. They do not understand Chinese politics at all. They think China is just a better version of the US, more meritocratic (seriously), less political instability (again, seriously), and more accommodating to special interests (...seriously). I think the assumption people make is: AAPL understand what is going on...they do not, the reason they are doing things like this is because they don't understand (AAPL is one of the worst for this kind of thing, their executives are extremely aggressive in everything they do, they take home far more than they are worth, and they understand almost nothing outside of their business...if you look at GOOGL or AMZN, it is quite different).