The blinking would have been because Apple does make a ton of money in the App Store. So it would have been cheaper for them, hypothetically, to pay off Epic to go away or to make some nonsense carve-out in their TOS that was hyper-focused on allowing Fortnite to work while excluding all other stores-in-stores than to risk the Courts would say "Hmmm..... Y'know..... The way you run your store looks... a lot like a monopoly. Maybe you can't run it like that anymore. In fact... Maybe you can't run it at all. Maybe no company that makes the hardware also gets to dictate the software that runs on that hardware exclusively. How about we give you, oh, six months to divest the App Store into a separate company and re-tool the iPhone OS to allow loading multiple stores?"

Perhaps not a likely scenario, but US law is highly path-dependent and at the end of the day, judges' interpretations of law and precedent are all that matters regarding the correctness of a court decision.