Nobody gave a shit about the mobile web until Apple launched the iPhone, where one of its main selling points was a “desktop-class web browser”, where Steve Jobs told announced that if they wanted to run apps on the iPhone, they should be web apps.

Then suddenly everybody started demanding “iPhone-compatible websites” overnight. Nobody was asking for “mobile websites”, which until that point were shitty WAP/WML things, or – in the best case – cut back m.example.com microsites. People wanted “iPhone-compatible websites”.

And then all the other phone vendors used Apple’s open-source WebKit code (open-source thanks to KDE, useful on mobile thanks to Apple) to release their own browsers, and the mobile web took off like a rocket because suddenly it was useful because people could use real websites.

And let’s not forget Steve Jobs telling people to avoid Flash and use open web standards instead.

There is a very clear before/after with the mobile web, and it’s the launch of the iPhone and all the work Apple put into making WebKit work well on mobile that provided that watershed moment.

Apple were championing the web in the time period you claim they were “intentionally undermining and artificially crippling it”.

Now, you may be underwhelmed by their performance in more recent years, but it’s simply factually untrue that they have had a 20 year campaign to undermine the web.