The UI merely triggers the event. And while I totally agree the UI should be as dumb as possible, the UI is the only element that receives lifecycle events (appear, etc.)

As such, I don't think a single one line call to start the sequence is out of line, especially since without it the code has the potential to never exit and leak.

And the code here may be "just an example", but these examples are supposedly written to teach developers techniques they can use... and those examples should in fact work.

And that's not even the case here, since pasting the code into Xcode to test throws an immediate error

Hint: MyViewModel is an optional.