*DISCLAIMER* Apple is a business and is profit-driven, and of course they want to keep people in their ecosystem.

First, “Apple makes their products worse to lock people into their ecosystem” just makes no sense from a business perspective.
— Pissing off your customers will make them MORE likely to continue buying your products? I must have missed that course in business school.
— In the specific example given (Apple slowing data transfer speeds on non-MFi-certified cables), the argument here is that Apple is so desperate to get some $1 licensing fees for MFi cables that they are going cripple functionality and risk the 50% profit margins on their $1200 phones?
— If an iPhone owner has a problem with charging or data transfer using a cheap cable, are they more likely to blame (and call for tech support) Apple or some no-name cable manufacturer out of China? And what would be the cost of paying that tech support person to assist that customer?

It’s fine to hate Apple or disagree with their business decisions, but it’s disingenuous to ascribe everything to evil intent and not even consider technological or business reasons for some of those decisions.