We're helping to support conversational customer support agents that can help users better during off-hours and scheduling assistants that can interact with and understand user requests better than current models over SMS/RCS. This is definitely not just spam but instead the future of conversational 2-way messaging.

I don't think anyone would be expressing the same level of concern if the conversations were only started/triggered by an inbound [to you] message.

Commingling things like cart abandonment and (actual, user-initiated) conversational messaging dramatically increases the risk that Apple takes action, from my point of view.