Sorry, but its easy to say that if they're not grabbing 30% of sales from YOUR small business. If you think this fight is about Facebook or Match or NY, you're missing the whole point. Those big guys can take care of themselves just fine.
They're not grabbing 30% of the sales from ANY small business. They lowered their fees to 15% for the first million dollars (I think both per year and per app).
Not only do Apple take 30% of this, they screwed over all those developers by removing their (ad platforms mostly) ability to track users, thus breaking the developers monetisation model.
I honestly find it hard to believe that they didn't realise that this was going to hit them hard with IAP revenue, but then I've always been surprised at the lack of joined up thinking in large companies.
Therefore, I suspect that this will be substantially weakened/rolled back over the next few years (this process has already started, btw).
If you go with SBA definitions, they use a $1 million to about $40 million range for revenue, and a maximum of 100 to 1,500 employees depending on the industry[1].
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/01/what-is-a-sma...
Meanwhile, when someone says "small businesses" cannot afford something, and that small business is a 1,500 person software company with $40 million in revenue, I think more "that is no longer a small business" than "poor small business". And if it turns out I'm technically wrong about a legal definition of small business, that's not going to change how concerned I am about that 1,500 person company - it's going to make me specify my concern is around supersmall businesses or whatever. That is, me being wrong about terminology is primarily going to make me change the terms I use.
I doubt they did it for generosity or for PR. I do think there was some amount of goodwill. I think it's Apple's way of ensuring that more apps get made. That is, they are "subsidizing(ish)" the creation of many small apps they make almost no money off of anyway in the hopes more small apps will be created which might contain a breakout success. If lowering the revenue on all small apps leads someone to try to make an app and fall into viral like Candy Crush, well Apple is probably going to make more on that one app than they "lost" on all the small apps they charged 15% on combined.