They got lawsuits because they purposely chose a battery that would not be sufficient after a few years of use because they wanted a thin phone, and instead of copping to that and providing support for users to cheaply and easily replace such underspecced batteries, they silently updated their OS to just throttle itself to death to "fix" it.

These batteries were not fit for purpose. The phone design was defective. It literally could not manage after normal and expected degradation.

Imagine if, after Microsoft failed to build the Xbox 360 correctly, they just silently throttled all the machines to reduce the chance they would fail, rather than what they had to do, which was replace all the defective machines, 25% of the fleet, on their own dime.

In most countries that aren't the USA, consumers have a right to expect their products to work for some time and be fit for purpose. Apple blatantly violated that right, and used a quiet software update to hide that.

Apple loves to just deny and ignore their design failures. It used to be the norm for Macbooks to just cook their GPU to death, and apple would always refuse to acknowledge such things until they settled the lawsuit and quietly put up some sort of "we will fix this at your expense" program.