I'm going to set aside your rather mid-tier developer criticisms of Safari, and I'll refrain from vomiting out verbiage of similar problems developing for Chrome, which nobody cares about because Chrome is what web developers think the web is. Chrome is seen as the standard whereas lazy minds desperately try to dismiss Safari as an inconvenience.
Your analysis is flawed at the core because you persist in making the same logical error which mid-tier web developers always make. Only web developers choose/change browsers because another one is "better". Ninety-nine percent of everyone else doesn't choose/change browsers, or if they do, it's because they were unwittingly exposed to an external influence, e.g.
1. Dark patterns (e.g. as employed by Microsoft in the 1990s, or Google in the 2020s);
2. Herd mentality ("my Son told me to use Chrome instead");
3. Because a website is broken (because the developer stubbornly refuses to believe that any web browser exists other than the bleeding edge release of Chromium)
And sorry but I just laughed when you said you need to spend "1000s of dollars each year on new devices". The only people who might need to do that are large corporations which already spend 1,000,000s of USD each year on developer salaries. A one-man team needs, at most, one desktop Mac made in the past 8 years ($200–1000 every 3–6 years) and one iOS device made in the past 5 years ($100–500 every 2–4 years). And that's assuming they don't already have either or both of these. And that's assuming that you're trying to do very complicated things. Most web developers shouldn't be doing anything that would break on a 10-year-old version of any major web browser (with the exception of TLS root certificates).
As an independent web developer with a Mac and iPhone, I begrudgingly buy and maintain a Windows computer and an Android phone, but you don't see me bitching and moaning about that, even though it's exactly the same thing.
No, it's not different because you're "forced" to acquire a new or used Apple product. As a developer, you are "forced" to acquire a reasonable spectrum of products based on what your audience is using. You are "forced" to test in Chrome. You are "forced" to pay taxes on income. You can wish the world was different, but wishes don't change practical realities.
Your analysis is flawed at the core because you persist in making the same logical error which mid-tier web developers always make. Only web developers choose/change browsers because another one is "better". Ninety-nine percent of everyone else doesn't choose/change browsers, or if they do, it's because they were unwittingly exposed to an external influence, e.g.
1. Dark patterns (e.g. as employed by Microsoft in the 1990s, or Google in the 2020s);
2. Herd mentality ("my Son told me to use Chrome instead");
3. Because a website is broken (because the developer stubbornly refuses to believe that any web browser exists other than the bleeding edge release of Chromium)
And sorry but I just laughed when you said you need to spend "1000s of dollars each year on new devices". The only people who might need to do that are large corporations which already spend 1,000,000s of USD each year on developer salaries. A one-man team needs, at most, one desktop Mac made in the past 8 years ($200–1000 every 3–6 years) and one iOS device made in the past 5 years ($100–500 every 2–4 years). And that's assuming they don't already have either or both of these. And that's assuming that you're trying to do very complicated things. Most web developers shouldn't be doing anything that would break on a 10-year-old version of any major web browser (with the exception of TLS root certificates).
As an independent web developer with a Mac and iPhone, I begrudgingly buy and maintain a Windows computer and an Android phone, but you don't see me bitching and moaning about that, even though it's exactly the same thing.
No, it's not different because you're "forced" to acquire a new or used Apple product. As a developer, you are "forced" to acquire a reasonable spectrum of products based on what your audience is using. You are "forced" to test in Chrome. You are "forced" to pay taxes on income. You can wish the world was different, but wishes don't change practical realities.