This doesn't match up with what I've heard from people I know within Apple, but perhaps things have changed recently. Certainly the encrapification seems to have gotten worse - my suspicion is that the services businesses have too much power within the company and are damaging product design to boost their own numbers.

There's an excellent Ben Thompson piece where he points out one of the big missteps of Apple executives. He was talking about Tim Cook and the like in the context of App Store legal case. He says Apple started drinking their own kool-aid around privacy, and user benefit - which makes them want to seek rent a lot more. I suspect your friends at Apple might be falling onto that as well.

This will be like saying - there are good people working at Nestle. The packaged water business is the villian, but people are nice.