They’re a business. Reducing their costs (while charging you a premium) is absolutely what they do.

Apple’s whole deal for decades now has been building a vertical supply chain. Using their own SSD controller is one less component they have to pay others for.

They just don’t give a shit about downsides: aftermarket repairers or user upgradeability.

It’s more cost effective to integrate the controller.

Being worse for customers is just a happy accident.

It’s replaceable, it’s not upgradable.

Apple doesn’t use standard NVMe M.2 drives. The controller is built into the SoC rather than being on the storage device itself.

Even if I wanted to visit the states. Can I risk having my holiday ruined and the money I’d lose if I was randomly turned away at the border?

It’s not even safe to transit the states at the moment.

I goes the water misters to lower temperature at the likes of Disneyland would be illegal under that wording. They’re emitting a chemical (water) to explicitly lower the temperature via evaporative cooling.