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I wonder why Apple allows this. Do the carriers really have more leverage than Apple here?

Apple has good reasons to allow this. Inside a corporate network for example you may not want DNS queries going to Apple’s servers.

So Apple has made it very easy for a network admin to disable private relay. All an admin needs to do is blocking name lookups for relay.Apple.com*

*I don’t recall the actual DN used, it’s in Apple’s docs if you are curious.

The OS should be able to distinguish between a corporate network and mobile carrier, right?

It can, but if mask.icloud.com is where the relay connection needs to go that wouldn’t help.

Apple still shouldn't make it so easy to block this wholesale, even on corporate networks. Instead, they should have a way to make only corporate-internal traffic not go through it.

I think if you gave most people the choice to either:

a) disable this feature (that they likely don't fully understand) or

b) change their cellular service provider

they're going to choose the former even though migrating your phone number is pretty damn easy nowadays.

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