I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. If companies could get away with making a car as unsafe as the model T, you’d probably see quite a few $10k cars on the road. But as it stands today, most cars are required by law to have all sorts of safety features built in.

As our standard of living and safety goes up, so does the price of goods because more is required to go into R&D and manufacturing.

As it currently stands, they can’t let the user decide under the DMA. To do that they’d need to build an entirely new PWA API and put time into making sure browser engines other than WebKit can’t escape their sandbox. After they do that, then they can let the user decide since all web browsers would then be equal. But as the poster above you said, PWA install rates are very low outside of the small tech enthusiast circle so I don’t blame Apple for axing this feature under the time crunch. I do hope they re-visit this issue and enable PWAs for all engines though because I love the idea of PWAs.