No, it's a distopian fucking horrorshow. You're right, of course. Humans are involved, it's not consistent, you're witnessing a state machine where 'opinion and carefulness of the human(s) that are part of this process' is a significant chunk of how it works.
But, __the escalation features__ are clichéd Catch-22-esque lunacy, and the actual information you receive in order to ascertain which part of the big state machine caused the rejection is non-existent.
If this was how a government worked, I'd expect literal "shoot a leader in broad daylight and storm their palace" levels of unrest in a week.
Apple (and other corps) are perfectly capable of reasoning beyond the almighty dollar. Tim Cook did it, presumably, in a rather famous incident yelling down someone on the earnings call questioning apple's decision to spend extra cash on environmentally friendlier packaging and distribution processes. Possibly Tim really is a short sighted moron who just thinks its worth wasting money on the environment ('wasting money' in the sense of the amoral stockholder only, of course!), but I'm assuming someone of Tim's caliber is a bit more intelligent than that, and Tim's thought through the (potential) brand damage, let alone the benefits of exuding an imagine of being environmentally friendlier than needed. Which isn't just "brand", but also staving off government intervention.
So, given that Tim and co are presumably capable of thinking through the repercussions of how the company operates, are they truly making the call that causing people the kind of pain and frustration that makes posts like this rise to the top of hackernews is somehow 'worth it', or are they, at least in this highly specific regard, short-sighted morons / dangerously uninformed about how their own company's processes work?
I just do not understand. Whatever it costs to stop pissing off and chasing away developers for your platform whilst arming the masses to demand regulatory intervention HAS to be worth it. And if Apple and co can't see that, I say; Heck yeah. Bring on the fucking regulators. I know and accept it'll suck and they'll make a hash of it, but odds are good it won't be such a shitshow as what app review is today, and examples need to be made.