The EU tried very hard, for very many years to signal to the industry "do this yourself so you don't have to legislate it, we don't want to legislate it, you don't want us to legislate it" but Apple (and only Apple) just refused to listen, so here we are.

For micro-USB, they got the industry together in a "memorandum of understanding" to get them to self-implement it without regulation, and it worked great - everyone adopted micro-USB, and then could switch to USB-C, without thinking about legislation with the understanding that the industry would use common standards.

The whole rest of the industry adopted the common standard and are looking at Apple "hey if they can do it why can't we?". If the EU doesn't crack down on Apple now, we're going to end up back again with a Samsung charger, a Sony charger etc.