It's not just about emotion or loyalty. It's about built-up knowledge and the difficulty of switching.
When you're a long time user, you know how to do everything with what you're using - whether that's an operating system, a programming language, or something else.
The latest product isn't good and your suggestion is "don't buy it." OK, what do I do instead? Buy a Windows or Linux laptop where I have to re-learn a decade's worth of knowing-how-everything-works? Build up my natural flow in a new OS? Find whatever are the Windows alternatives for all the little things that I do on my Mac?
I'm not saying that companies owe things to their customers, but I think it's really simplistic to say that it's just an emotional investment and misplaced loyalty. People have a tool and then a company makes that tool worse. There are other tools, but it takes time to learn them, figure out their differences and how to get everything done with them, etc. Pretending that there's zero cost to switching is disingenuous.
For example: if you're a software engineer and someone made your main programming language bad, there's a high cost to switching to a new language. Even if you're excellent at learning new languages, you don't know which libraries are good, you don't know what various functions are named, you don't know what warts are in the build system (and how to avoid them), etc.
It's not just some emotional response or misplaced loyalty. It's that you've built up skills over many years that are tied to that thing.
Companies owe their livelihoods to their customers. If they do stupid shit and annoy those customers they lose money and potentially kill the business.
There is a long list of companies which have done themselves serious financial harm, or even slit their own throats by failing to understand how Customer World works.
No one is too big to fail. Especially in computing. There's also a long list of companies which looked like permanent fixtures for a while and were dead a few years later.
As for Apple - I have a busy lock screen, and I can no longer read the time because the big numbers are too thin and the refraction effect makes them impossible to read.
Rookie, stupid error. Just embarrassing.
Fwiw, if you go into settings -> Wallpaper on iOS, you can change the font and the font size of the time on the lockscreen, if that's your beef.