That sounds implausible. For a premium brand the marginal unit should be comfortably profitable, so they will have the resources to saturate the market at exponential speed purely from their unit economics. The somewhat theatrical lines outside the store aside, Apple has never had a strategic problem meeting the demand for Apple computers.

It seems a lot more likely that you get executives who come in and believe that narratives beat reality, there are a lot of people like that in the world. They are the sort who will abandon the reality of quality because that costs money then get confused when the narrative catches up. Or you get an idiot who is data-driven and detects that there is no immediate change in sales when they compromise on quality so they conclude that quality isn't valued by consumers. No malice, just a lack of strategic thinking.