I (quite honestly, not being snarky) think the whole reason for that was the EC were trying to target Apple (and some other US tech companies) while pretending to not specifically target them, and in this case wanted Apple to do certain specific actions but couldn't be that prescriptive for the aforementioned reasons, so Apple was able to take advantage of that wiggle-room to take a different tack.

If they'd just been upfront that they were directly targeting a few US companies and prescribed exactly what to do, then the DMA wouldn't be a mess that made some things worse, and they could have made Apple to do what they wanted.