He spent 20 years building technology to empower users, and Apple decided that user empowerment is an an area they no longer want to be in. That's wow a new era in computing, that is all in on changing users into mere consumers
They didn't decide that. They decided this particular guy was not necessarily the guy to do that. You don't just go and buy the best automation app on the marketplace because you don't like automation - you do it to bring in new blood and a new perspective.
This is all just speculation. We don't know anything. But it's possible that there was a difference in opinion about what sort of user to target.
Courting power users used to be much more popular than it is today. It seems that today all large tech companies target IT professionals and consumers with a completely separate set of offerings. There's very little in between any more. On the consumer side they go for ultimate scale because nothing else moves the needle for them.
It wouldn't surprise me if Apple had decided to deprecate everything that isn't accessible to all consumers, which would have frustrated someone who has worked for decades to let power users automate tasks in ways that the average consumer never would.
As I said, all pure speculation for our entertainment :-)
