> Why would any PWA say that, if Safari had proper support for PWA?
For the same reason that far too many desktop websites say that today.
> Say the developer is from a village in India or Nigeria who has just a Raspberry Pi to develop apps
Apple is not catering to this developer demographic.
> For all the times Apple uses 'Equality' in its marketing, the Apple platform & ecosystem restrictions clearly seems to be aimed at the privileged
You're conflating developers with users. What fraction of iPhone users are writing apps? If you wanted to prioritize users, there's much tougher questions you could ask.
Ha. Using Foundation, Swift and SwiftUI I can write an app that doesn't require a trip to GitHub or Node.js in order to work properly. I can prototype my UI right there in Xcode, and if there's something I need that hasn't made it into SwiftUI yet I can bring in things from UIKit without very much effort. Best of all, I can build for macOS as well as iOS from the same codebase now. It's really hard to get more developer-friendly than that, unless you mean "web-developer-who-doesn't-want-to-learn-iOS-friendly".
For the same reason that far too many desktop websites say that today.
> Say the developer is from a village in India or Nigeria who has just a Raspberry Pi to develop apps
Apple is not catering to this developer demographic.
> For all the times Apple uses 'Equality' in its marketing, the Apple platform & ecosystem restrictions clearly seems to be aimed at the privileged
You're conflating developers with users. What fraction of iPhone users are writing apps? If you wanted to prioritize users, there's much tougher questions you could ask.