Their big mistake was how they communicated (or didn’t) that it was happening. The technical reasoning behind it was sound, and it resulted in actually prolonging the life of the device.
As the battery wore down, the phone would still function, just slower for peak CPU demand. Other devices would just die and people would buy new ones, so not throttling had the effect of people buying newer devices more often than needed.
The main issue is they should have alerted people that performance was degrading so they could get a new battery.
Can you overclock your Android phone? Force it to run faster at a cost to battery life and overall stability, just by changing a setting in the UI?
Assuming the answer is "no", then Android doesn't actually grant you meaningfully greater freedom in this regard than Apple does: you're just upset about the communication around a particular feature/bug-workaround that requires underclocking the phone temporarily in certain situations.
I can install on it everything I want, including a kernel that lets me do so. Don't rephrase my words, Apple does not want you to interfere with your own machine.
You were complaining about a very specific incident, using wording that suggested you either didn't understand the background behind it, or were deliberately attempting to obscure that background in order to paint Apple as worse than they are.
If your beef with Apple is the lack of repairability of their phones and laptops, then you do you. Personally, I have no problem with it, because it's a tradeoff that gets me laptops with higher build quality in a smaller package.
But if your stated beef with Apple is something that isn't true or doesn't make a lick of sense, I'm gonna call it out, if only to help reduce the degree to which the false narrative about the throttling spreads.
As the battery wore down, the phone would still function, just slower for peak CPU demand. Other devices would just die and people would buy new ones, so not throttling had the effect of people buying newer devices more often than needed.
The main issue is they should have alerted people that performance was degrading so they could get a new battery.