I see what you mean but I don’t know it’s that simple.
There have always been unspoken dividing lines between software based on reputation. Systems software. Utilities. Trusted apps. Speculative apps from less well know authors. Web Browsers that run the most dangerous code of all: webpages.
Sliding down the loss-of-permissions slope seems to mean that everything is untrusted these days and nothing counts as part of the club anymore,
unless it’s shipped by the vendor.
What made Mac OS X so wonderful was that the vendor seemed humble. They shipped their glitter but it was on top of an open system. Third parties were kept at arms length if they were apps but underneath — if you knew what you were doing enough to know there was an underneath — the choices were yours to make.
Went the other way, from Linux to the Mac. Don't have a lot of problems with permissions and whatnot getting in the way of what I'm doing. When I used Linux (it's been a while), I got tired of having problems doing basic things like setting up wifi so I just switched and haven't regretted it yet.
It's not 1997 anymore. Security needs have changed over time.
With modern systems, running unknown code is vastly riskier than it was 20 years ago.