The main reason for the hubbub, back in the day, was that Apple completely obscured (a) that they were throttling performance, and (b) that replacing the battery was the fix.

I completely believe that they made the decision to throttle performance thinking it was the best action for their customers, and I agree with them. Throttling is better than random shutdowns. However, it's very easy to imagine that they dragged their feet so long on explaining what was going on because throttled phones were driving upgrade sales, while explaining throttling only drove battery sales.

I've never seen anyone claiming to have insider knowledge of the decisions around this inside Apple, unfortunately.