I’m not so sure. If you read back up that thread, the thought that triggered it was from qzervaas:

   Apple's already shown they don't like this behaviour with their randomised MAC addresses in iOS 8+.

And elsewhere in the thread people called out the fact apple had already introduced support for ad blocking. So Apple’s privacy-positive posture was already in the air.

I think there is a sense in which privacy was already a differentiator for Apple in iOS (as contrasted with Google’s motives in android in particular of course) - so this did feel like a not completely implausible way they could go to double down on that differentiator.