[throwaway2048]

Pledge is not intended for every possible usecase, thats why its part of the program code itself.

If the programmer themseves can make an intelligent decision about if and when to invoke pledge, rather than some predefined policy, you dont have to worry about every single usecase in existence and thus suffer the massively overwrought interfaces this requires. All a programmer has to do in the least effort case is delay pledge calls until after the problematic functionality, or perhaps not use pledge at all.

This is all while obtaining roughly equivilent benfits of something like selinux in a huge majority of cases.

The primary goal of pledge is to make using it as simple as it can possibly be, so it actually gets used.