You need an Apple developer account to even make software for iOS. Alternate app stores are distributed on the web, not Apple’s App Store. Since an alternative app store is an iOS app, Apple banning Epic’s developer account means they’re banned from making one.
Third party browser & JavaScript engine + ability to install web apps on the Home screen = third party app store that doesn’t have to pay Apple’s fees.
When Apple could force everyone to use Apple’s WebKit, web apps didn’t matter as much as Apple could limit WebKit features to push people to the App Store. E.g. it took ages to get push notifications on WebKit. If Google and Mozilla are free to make whatever improvements to their browser engines, the need to have native apps on the phone decreases considerably.
It’s not fewer people that’s the problem, but fewer people too fast. A society needs labor to provide the goods and services people need. If the share of people who do labor (working age) to people who don’t (children and the elderly) becomes too lopsided, the burden on those who work becomes unsustainable. (The Boomers had the opposite: they had a smaller older generation and didn’t have many children, so during their prime years the working age population was much larger than dependants on both ends of the age pyramid. That’s part of the reason why they were so prosperous.)
Going by total fertility rate (children per woman):
The last name of the president of Russia is Пу́тин. Since people can’t read that without knowing Cyrillic, we need a way to map Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. However, neither Cyrillic nor Latin script have universal pronunciations: the phonetic value of letters change depending on the language. This leads to the romanization of a name being different depending what the source and target language is. Пу́тин is Putin for Russian-to-English, but Poutine for Russian-to-French. They’re both equally correct, and neither is a change from the other.