No, it seems like we're litigating the cadence for a period of 15 years, ending only 2 years ago.
Here's the options:
1. Apple was wildly irresponsible with the security and privacy of their users for a decade and a half, despite this childish press release about how EU is making their users less secure.
2. The risk profile of browsers only changed in the last couple of years, and until then it was totally safe for iOS browsers not to be patched regularly.
3. Apple doesn't particularly prioritize their users' security, but are setting up one more malicious compliance roadblock for anything that could threaten the tens of billions in pure profit they squeeze out of the Safari monopoly.
None of those options apply: Apple did (and still does) ship regular security updates for iOS users which included Safari, but did not include Safari web-platform feature updates (i.e. CSS+JS+etc support) unless it was a significant iOS update (such as the yearly major-number increase or the "half-term" point releases) until 2022.
Apple's handling of Safari mirrors Microsoft's stated plans for Internet Explorer back when Windows XP (and IE6) launched in 2001: they said they'd treat the browser as a core OS component that would only receive major web-platform updates with major OS releases (hence why we had to wait five years between IE6 and IE7, during which Firefox saved us from a mediocre web experience).
...could be worse: could have been like Outlook which has been stuck on Word's HTML rendering engine since 2007 right through until today's "New Outlook" rewrite - that's that's got to be an unbeatable record for the "world's most stagnant web-browser".
Here's the options:
1. Apple was wildly irresponsible with the security and privacy of their users for a decade and a half, despite this childish press release about how EU is making their users less secure.
2. The risk profile of browsers only changed in the last couple of years, and until then it was totally safe for iOS browsers not to be patched regularly.
3. Apple doesn't particularly prioritize their users' security, but are setting up one more malicious compliance roadblock for anything that could threaten the tens of billions in pure profit they squeeze out of the Safari monopoly.