If a EU regulation was at fault, only systems in the EU should've been affected. There would be no reason to adhere to complicated EU rules everywhere else globally.
This doesn't add up. They need to find a more believable fall guy.
So I don't agree with this blame game, but in order to limit the scope of this to EU, they would have had to maintain two different designs, so it just makes sense to change the global design to suit the EU agreement. If it were something like bundling, then that's light enough to maybe change regionally, but it's too much to maintain a whole other kernel architecture.
Happens all the time with regulations. For example my company doesn't have different products to comply with different environmental regulations, they just compose the strictest superset of the international regulations and follow those. California passes a law and it may change the global strategy.
Most products are designed once to conform to all global standards. No one wants to maintain different products for each market unless it's really niche. The world is highly globalized whether you like it or not.