People will absolutely not blame Apple if the exact thing they warned would happen, and said would be really bad, actually turns out to happen and be really bad.

Apple has very well-funded PR. They will make sure that the EC is blamed.

Then, they get to be the heroes once the law is changed to allow them to come to everyone's rescue by banishing all third-party app access forever. They would ultimately be the saviours.

Yeah and we've already seen this with Facebook getting blamed for Cambridge Analytica.