WWDC may be focused on developers but it's a big part of Apple's software story as a whole - if it wasn't, then there'd be no keynote, just developers sessions. These are not mutually exclusive: the "front-end" story and the "back-end" story are equally important. But the former is of interest to billions of people while the latter relates to quite a smaller crowd. Hence pieces like this one.

Furthermore, to be honest I do not see actual innovation in Apple's evolving programming languages, frameworks etc. "Innovation" means "something that was not there before" by definition, it does not mean "evolution". Of that we have plenty from Apple as well as others, but that's to be expected. Tech evolves all the time. But few companies push boundaries by actually doing something new.

To be honest the LAST thing that I would call "innovative" would be Apple's rewriting of macOS for the M1 architecture. It's such a given, such a requirement, that nothing about it can be *new*.