Apple's ethos of giving more to creators was because they were focused on the niche markets that would spend good money for good products. By the late 90s, creators were their primary users so the survival of Apple meant catering to them even if it meant playing nicely with Microsoft and Adobe. Once they got a whiff of the mass market, it took them until 2019-ish to realize they had lost something.
Apple's modern identity is a lifestyle brand cosplaying as a luxury brand. Creator ("Pro"), to modern Apple, means YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, etc... All the people who might use their very expensive, but not unreasonably so hardware to visibly flaunt their taste over the slightly-less-wealthy Android/Windows plebs. Think high-res-cameras-in-the-iPhone-with-no-high-speed-data-port kind of "Pro" So, they equate Pro to a set of apps and not an ecosystem for enabling those apps, whereas before, they needed that ecosystem for their survival (the Carbon era).