That would be my guess, the review process is incredibly arbitrary. We made an minor change to our App that's been in the store for years and it was rejected because suddenly our App was misusing Apple branding and also promoting another Platform. Both objections cited a screen that's been in the App for years that allows the user to make a payment using Check, Credit Card, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.

Apparently we magically started mis-using the Apple Pay log and were promoting Google/Android for having the Google Pay logo. I responded back asking if we needed to remove the PayPal, Visa and Mastercard logs since they were competing platforms to Apple Pay as well. The random reviewer that looked at it next said it was fine and approved it.

I have had similar experiences with it being arbitrary. I'll push up a quick bug fix for something and get dinged on something completely unrelated, meaning I have to wait for a second review to get my fix in. It's pretty frustrating.

The problem is that often the only effective way to 'appeal' those failures is to make a sufficiently large public stink that someone with the power to fix it is notified (by employees seeing the bad press) and actually fixes it.

Apple was involved so everyone was already chomping at the bit with their rhetoric and pitchforks.

Apple only has its self to blame when it doesn’t necessarily get the benefit of the doubt as far as potential Chinese policy influence goes.

Maybe a non-senior, or even senior reviewer rejected it to be safe until a higher-up could make the executive decision on whether or not it was allowed.