I don't think that's fair, they've spent a lot of time and effort ensuring the Mac is still an open/UNIX like platform, including (where they didn't have to):

- Per-install boot security policies

- Custom kernel boot (kmutil configure-boot)

- Raw-image boot mode

- XNU source releases

- Disabling SIP

- Disabling the Signed System Volume

- Third-party kernel extensions

- Developer ID distribution and notarisation

- Gatekeeper "Open Anyway" override

- Hypervisor.framework

- Virtualization.framework

- Rosetta for Linux VMs

- Nested virtualisation

- macOS guest provisioning

- DiskImageKit

- Custom Virtio devices

- Containerization framework

These are basically all things that an engineering org can justify as necessary for some reason but can immediately disappear when leadership announces a change in strategy.

Not to take away from your point too much - this is a significant amount of work that shows their current stance towards maintaining the mac as a premium development platform. But I imagine they will start to split this - lower cost SKUs will get the iOS-ified OS while "Pro" SKUs will get (some of) the above and can still install homebrew, to prevent a full developer revolt.

Techies will figure out how to "jailbreak" the lower SKUs to unlock the full experience and the amount of people that follow through with that will round to 0%. Tech businesses will buy the >$3k Pros for their devs.

"Everyone" will be "happy".