Apple was a very segmented company back then (I've no idea what it's like now) and the online store had three groups that contributed to it: my team, which designed the pages; an engineering team, which took our designs and transformed them into WebObject templates that ran the site; and a content team, which controlled the database that spat out the images and prices.
I did my work in HTML/CSS/JS (and some PHP for the imagemagick stuff in this case), which the engineering team then had to adjust to fit the code their templates could output.
I don't recall much detail about how WebObjects was viewed. I do remember that at the time the store used a version of WebObjects that could only run on old hardware, so there was an impending deadline for a total re-write before the hardware stopped being available. I've no idea if they did that rewrite or swapped to a different system altogether.
Yes, the lore of the store code is what I'm thinking of. I made my way to Apple from 2017-2021 and it was still quite segmented. No morality in the segmentation, though. I enjoyed my team feeling like its own thing and we got to use Ruby because we all really liked it.
Were you writing WebObjects? Internally, how was WebObjects viewed at the time?