I agree, and that's exactly what they had done before now! I am glad they've done this and think it's a good thing all round, but it would be nice for the expectations to shift and the standards we hold companies to be higher where a situation where they allow you to install your own operating system without jumping through hoops is viewed as the norm as opposed to a benevolent action.
It's a feature they do need though...? They test their hardware on Linux, if it doesn't work properly then they can potentially lose money. This is a random internal change that just so happened to align with the Asahi project. If they were trying to help, they'd let us know. It strikes me as desperation to call this a tacitly helpful move on their behalf.
That is an assertion with no evidence to support it, and lots to do the opposite (starting with the fact that this appeared a year after the initial M1 public avail).
> They test their hardware on Linux, if it doesn't work properly then they can potentially lose money.
That doesn't make any sense, apple does not support Linux on their machine (as demonstrated by Asahi having been working on that for more than a year now).
And even if they did "test their hardware on linux", that would have no relevance to the issue and change: Apple can build mach-o linux kernel files in whatever fashion they need, that is quite literally what Asahi did. TFA states that unambiguously and they're the Asahi project lead, they'd know.
The bare minimum would have been to not do that.