Well, it's pretty simple. If you want into Apple's ecosystem, you follow their rules. They've hardware-locked many other external things (dongles, charging cables, etc).

Cynics will say it's a money grab, proponents will say it greatly reduces or eliminates the risk of buying something that will not work right. Apple sells itself on the ability of their things working right out of the box.

> proponents will say it greatly reduces or eliminates the risk of buying something that will not work right.

IIRC, it's been shown that a massive percentage of the Apple chargers for sale on Amazon are difficult to spot counterfeits. Some of those use dangerous electronic designs.

Yeah, unfortunately Apple can't stop everyone from making bad 5VDC bricks with USB sockets. Perhaps the "approved" cables have some kind of overvoltage protection in them, but otherwise that's always been a weak point.