Many of us willingly pay a premium for that. It has its benefits and nobody forces you to lock yourself into their ecosystem. Crying about it when you willingly pick something outside of their defined ecosystem and have some weird expectation of access is baffling.
Not a single one of the items you've mentioned has to be a 'walled' experience when interacting with someone not inside the ecosystem, it's bizarre that you'd even think it would be unless you've got very little understanding of how computers work in 2023.
Also your reply suggests you haven't actually understood what I wrote
Your reply suggests you never understood what my original post was refering to.
Network effects absolutely do and Apple knows this. Otherwise they wouldn't go out of their way to distinguish non-Apple users in chats.
Cool, stay in the walled garden if you want to. That doesn't mean other users need to be forced within in it with you, too.
The vast majority of people aren't thinking "Wow, I love how Apple takes away my freedom and forces me to use apps even if I might want to use something else", they're buying an iPhone because it's shiny and is what they're familiar with.
Those people deserve to be afforded user freedom and to own the devices they purchased.
Go up to a random stranger and ask how much it would be worth to them to be able to sideload apps or have a bash terminal on their iPhone. They wouldn’t even say “zero dollars”, they would just laugh.
I am a professional iOS developer and I also couldn’t possibly care less.
The average user doesn't give a crap if you can sideload some random app that is only needing to be sideloaded because its likely dodgy as hell.
Also if someones using an iOS device and is skilled enough to need to sideload then they'll know full well they CAN sideload by deploying an app from xcode.