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Defaults are powerful, and IE was default.

If you’re a large bureaucracy in the early 2000s you went with whatever was default - and that was IE.

Defaults were seen as so powerful, that MS was anti-trusted for this. They did it anyways at the time because the juice was worth the squeeze.

I still do not understand how Apple gets away doing the same (or worse) with Safari on iOS.

Because Microsoft, Google and Apple are the fig leaf for each other. No Monopoly in sight.

Microsoft had to keep Apple alive to be their fig leaf, Google keeps Mozilla alive to be their fig leaf. Apple is not as dominant as Microsoft was.