Apple says it made these changes for other reasons, honestly, truly. And if it happened to have the same effect, then that was unfortunate, and unintended.

Only Apple really knows. But there was a slew of changes and reversals following the drama. "Oh, we'll implement notifications now", "Oh, we'll change the peak performance behavior", and "we will change and add additional diagnostics to make sure issues are battery related" certainly has a feel for a bunch of ex post facto rationalization of several things that seem, to me, that if it was truly a battery thing all along, would have been functional requirements.