I think this is mostly a question of availability: my read is that Apex is primarily meant as a groupset for bike manufacturers. For its intended market, gravel bikes, it seems like a slam dunk: it offers great 1x12 shifting performance, electronic shifting will definitely be something that attracts customers and the pricing is very reasonable. Given that gravel bikes are often the second or third bike, I reckon that customers are often more on a budget. On the other hand, bike weight matters less, and the extra chunk Apex AXS packs is not that big of a deal. If you are a weight weenie, you know anyway you’ll have to spend tons more to get something much lighter.
I reckon Rival could be positioned more as an upgrade or something sold as a separate groupset.
Alternatively, you could think about whether it made sense for SRAM to merge Force and Rival into a single groupset instead.
Up until now Rival was very popular, because it was the cheapest electronic groupset (it still is if you want 2x). I also think SRAM should do away with their SX mountain bike groupset and just leave that to NX/Apex.
Yes, this. IMHO this is great, and I like that SRAM hasn’t gimped Apex AXS in any way as far as I can tell.
With mechanical shifters, it actually does make a difference whether you go for e. g. a Deore trigger shifter or an XT trigger shifter. With electronic shifters that does not matter at all, a button press is a button press. (I wish bike manufacturers would do the opposite of what they have been doing for the longest time, spec a higher-level RD but lower-level shifters.)