None of that suggests any malice. We don’t know what happened internally, other than the arial designer was eventually let go. That engineer could have been pushing the “every phone has the problem” narrative and brushing it off. At some point the pressure from customer feedback could have meant they were overruled and ordered to retest, or test under the specific conditions.

The fact that Apple changed their stance from “here’s a workaround” to “here’s a free bumper” is a sign they reacted to something, and that could have been anything from the conclusion of internal testing to a PR job to keep customers happy.

If they had said there was no design flaw from the start and stuck with that the whole way then I’d understand people’s reaction, but all I see is a company that said “don’t hold it that way” as a workaround then eventually issued free bumpers, thus confirming the issue. That doesn’t suggest they were blaming the user for doing something wrong. The sentiment just wasn’t there.