Perhaps the statement should be, Safari is in no way a better browser than any competitor for developers.
Apple make products for the top end of customers and they don't want to be dealing with complaints from Grandma about battery life because they hit a series of dark patterns and accidentally installed Chrome and made it default.
They've made it quite clear IMO that pwa style products would be better served by a native app.
No. Developer productivity is important, and it does impact the end user in quality and amount of features.