The same thing happened with the introduction of UAC.It may be necessary though it conditions people to blindly allow as their default reaction, which is really counter-productive to safety.
It actually doesn't provide a prompt. It silently denies access (I think maybe it shows a notification in the bottom right?) and that's that. You have to navigate to the protection settings window in order to whitelist a program. Which I guess makes sense, since if you don't add friction, people will just blindly allow everything as you say. I had problems like stuff not working despite whitelisting, which is what really annoyed me. I would've left it on otherwise.