Consider that your use case is relevant for an infinitesimally small percentage of Apple's user base. It would be an utter waste of time for them to cater to you, and it's a waste of your money to buy their products.

Consider that their point is not just about this specific use case.

Apple spends a huge amount of effort maintaining two different operating systems for what is pretty much the same machine under the hood. Don’t be naive and try to rationalize their bad behavior. They clearly just want to maintain their lucrative software distribution monopoly.

Do you suppose that Google or Samsung are self-consciously catering to my specific use case either? I don't. But an Android tablet is open enough that I can do what I want to do with it, and an iPad is not.

Sure, they don't like programmers, why not. Then who are the other users which could make use of iPads as powerful machine?

Gaming? It's complicated for them as well and I have the impression they also hate gamers.

Video editing? Maybe, but what does the latest CPU brings on the table for that compared to the other ones?

Office tools? The situation looks as miserable as programmers.

3D modeling? Maya3d/Blender/... aren't available and even if it would be, Apple would likely ban plugins, making it useless.

AI tools? Too locked down to work.