Maybe our attention is being farmed? I have a friend who does astrology readings for a living and was curious why the app store doesn't allow astrology apps, a quick search revealed astrology apps exist on the app store so that's a red herring.

In app categories that bring a lot of low-effort submissions and clones, Apple requires new submissions to bring something new to the table.

Before these requirements the app store was filling up with thousands of flashlight apps, todo lists, and other simple apps that people would build (or clone) to get something into the app store.

If you read the related articles you'd see the App Store has decided there are enough of these types of apps and they don't accept any more unless they're noticeably different

They simply do not allow new astrology apps. They consider the market segment saturated.