I object to the premise.
> Configuration options and user empowerment was increasingly considered confusing or dangerous
This, in particular, is nonsense, but it’s a long-festering strain of nonsense. A particular subset of PC users truly believe that Apple decided, with the original Mac, to take away “user empowerment” and “dumb things down” because users might hurt themselves. That was never the motivation.
No, the point was to empower users in ways that actually mattered. Steve Jobs’ “bicycle for the mind” rhetoric was trying to communicate this. You can disagree with the selection of what, exactly, matters, but the underlying motivation was _never_ to “protect users from themselves.” That’s a canard.
It's one thing for a GUI maker to move the task bar from side to top/bottom for instance, but another to also not allow you to have it back where you "need" it to be. Even when you do want to move defaults (like tmux changing hotkey from screens ctrl-a to ctrl-b) it still is a good idea to allow people to set it back, even if only for a transitional period. Muscle memory takes a while to change for some, and GUIs are not except from that, so if you always had the trashcan to the right, moving it to the left will piss someone off, but not as much as preventing that someone from moving it back again, if that is their preference, perhaps even a preference that your previous versions of the GUIs made for them.
About the argument in general, the false premise would be that the set of things which "actually matter" applies universally. It's not a question of what exactly matters, but _to whom_. There are different types of users, and the pretense of always knowing what's good for all of them better than those users themselves is certainly not unique to one person's approach... even if Jobs' personality could make it appear as if he had it worse than most others in the industry.