They will change their game in some ways, or they'll have to stop selling in the EU. I'm sure the Neo was engineered for this. Apple really hate re-engineering mac cases. Even the plastic macbook that had a huge design flaw (the cracking topcase because of the screen bezel spacers crushing it), had this flaw for 4 years until they finally fixed it, and that was not really to fix the problem but because they wanted to do a glossy new design. For some reason they preferred fixing the topicase over and over for free instead of just fixing the problem. And it wouldn't have needed much. All that would have been needed was to modify the screen bezel: Make the plastic spacers either a lot wider (to spread out the pressure) or of a softer material. It's pretty insane they didn't even bother to redesign such a simple plastic part.
I had mine replaced 3 times over the 6 years I used it. Sometimes with some complaints as I had replaced the LCD with a matte panel (the plastic macbook used an atrocious quality ultra-reflecting TN screen with shit viewing angles). But they always did it for free after some pressure.
So I can imagine they wanted to be ahead of the game this time because the EU will set a deadline and they hate doing redesigns. I can't fathom why they hate doing that so much though. I worked in manufacturing too and we did small tweaks periodically, every 2-3 months or so there'd be a minor hardware revision to take comments from QA into account or to optimize for pricing & availability of components. Usually not the kind of redesign an untrained eye actually would notice. But Apple somehow just hates it.