That's disingenuous. It's not about money, it's literally about engineering velocity. The amount of planning and engineering required for an entire interoperability layer that also ensures security and privacy is absolutely going to be something like a year-long engineering effort minimum. You can't speed that up by adding more money.

So it's either try to get an exemption to deliver this feature to Europeans while that work gets done, or wait 12-18 months for the work to be done -- work that isn't required to launch in the rest of the world.

Apple just wants consumers to be happy and be able to use their features. But the EU is requiring a ton of additional interop engineering, so consumers will just have to keep waiting and get features 1 or 2 years after the rest of the world, or never.