I went to a third party, 250 EUR, they just repaired the motherboard, works like a charm, and did it in 1 day. It's been 2 years. Fuck apple.
For some people, that measure or metric doesn't matter, and that's fine, but it by no means is a universal "see this is better" approach. And I say this as someone who does board level repairs. On iPhones. (and that mostly came about because people tried to replace the screens on their phones with the power on, blowing the backlight circuit)
Doing something as a one-off is nothing compared to doing something world-scale.
They go after third parties who are using counterfeit or non-OEM parts.
This program, like the iPhone program, is not that program. This is for adventurous people who want to do the repair themselves because they don’t value their own time highly enough.
One can complain about how Apple deals with repair shops. One can complain about how Apple deals with self-service repair. One should not confuse the two situations as if they were in any way equivalent.