[TheJoeMan]

There's somewhere in the ballpark of 166,000 employees at Apple, just unfathomable scale [1]. It is not unreasonable to ask that someone specific is responsible for each particular small feature and ensuring it keeps working. Trying to apply an economic analysis to such a "free as in beer" operating system does not seem to work well. Consider the question of "how many small holes can you have in your wooden sailing ship"?

[1] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/aapl/employees/

[laserlight]

Not that it impacts your argument significantly, but for the sake of completeness, Apple employs a huge number of retail employees.

[AlexandrB]

Yes. A more useful number would be how many employees are working on macOS specifically. Hard to find a definitive number for that.

[saagarjha]

Less than 1% of that number. Of course this is hard to actually count properly since there is a lot of shared work across platforms.

[akerl_]

It’s not unreasonable to ask but they can and are saying “no”.