Hanlon's razor is great when you apply it to your personal relationships, but it falls apart when you apply it to trillion dollar companies and their golden geese.
I don't see why we should assume malice based on market capitalization. It's easy to imagine a situation where an organization the size of Apple just doesn't have the competence to deal with all the spam. They're a huge organization, I doubt any one person has a complete view of App Store moderation especially (by definition) their unknown unknowns.
It depends on how they measure moderation in the App store. Everything may appear to be going well from what they can see and measure. I see no reason to believe apps are getting through because of bribery when we can explain this situation as "large organizations are inefficient".
Law of large numbers seems to be one people ignore. If I’m making a scam app, I’ll just use multiple accounts and hope one gets through eventually. I won’t be discouraged by rejects because I’ll have an automated system that handles everything including retries. If I’m banned, I’ll just buy a new account and try again.
It's difficult to believe anything other than bribery.