I wasn’t working there but when Jobs came back, Gil Amelio was at the helm, not Sculley. Sculley was long gone by that time. Also worth noting is that Amelio had also cancelled a bunch of projects to cut down costs but Jobs’ was more drastic.
This is something Apple has done for years. Especially with the native iTunes UI. They used to use Sproutcore pretty heavily for stuff like this, which later became Ember.js