Then try to explain that rotating a few dozen TB of data offsite to cold offline storage every week isn't cheap. Because unlike some vendors, we take pride in data integrity and ensuring that our DR plan is actually.... you know, recoverable :P
It didn't stop attackers from using extremely common ways to punk the systems even under the best circumstances for the systems. A forgotten password gets leaked, using the backup applications/storage system's own encryption schemes against the victims, just deleting entire volumes or compromising the OS on the systems, the list goes on.
I wouldn't consider append-only an anti-ransomware technique, it just stops one of many common ways of compromising data. This is good, but I wouldn't rely on it to protect against even a run of the mill ransomware scheme.
To utterly destroy an organisation you don't erase or encrypt their data. You change it. Slowly. A little by a little. A birthday here, a name there, a number ... Using the normal ways to change this data. In this way you can go undiscovered for years, employees get blamed for making stupid errors for a LONG time and there is absolutely no way to fix things, no matter what the backup strategy is.