This is familiar to me from an adjacent industry…smart TVs. The reason Samsung, LG, et al develop their own UIs is not because they are good at it. It’s because if they give up and let their device become a dumb host for apps, they lose their relationships with customers (i.e. ad revenue) and accelerate their race to the bottom as commodity hardware vendors.

Customers don’t want this stuff. They want to launch Netflix or Prime Video or Disney and watch. But the premium hardware brands need to fight to stay alive, and giving customers what they want is a death sentence.

Are there really no customers who want the TV to have Netflix built in? At a streaming company I worked at, we put quite a lot of effort into working around all the smart TV firmware quirks so that you didn't need to buy a separate box if you had a supported TV.