Citation? To be sure, there was not universal outrage over Safari's attestation implementation, but out of curiosity I looked up the only thread I was aware of, in part because I couldn't remember what my reaction was at the time. That thread was a year ago and the overwhelming sentiment of the comments section is critical: >>31751203
Here were my comments at the time:
They're less forceful than they are now with Google, partially because I know more now about how attestation works than I did over a year ago, and partially because (as some people have also pointed out) Chrome's implementation is straightforwardly more dangerous than Apple's is.
But HN "actively defending" Safari? That's not the impression I get from the overall comment section and it's definitely not what I personally was doing. There are a lot of people in these comments calling Apple's implementation DRM. So I'm a little skeptical of the "nobody on HN cared about this with Safari" narrative that has sprung up; from what I can see media coverage was fairly positive, but people on HN were rightly critical. I'm not sure the facts match the narrative: Safari was criticized for this.
It's a fair critique that there wasn't a coordinated attempt to outright stop Apple, but I would once again remind everyone that attestation in Chrome is way more dangerous than attestation in iOS. The market matters, that's not context that can be ignored. So it's not really all that weird to me that people are more willing to react more strongly to abusive behavior in Chrome.