Likewise, I am a developer, a user, and I have fond memories of the old days of 2003 when I could download and run whatever I wanted on my Mac without any fear or security concerns.
Unfortunately, that world is no longer the one we live in.
One of the things I’ve learned about software security is the need to minimise the attack surface of your systems — don’t keep a database running on your web server unless you actually need it, don’t keep ports open unless they’re important, don’t install packages or dependencies you can do without — because everything has the potential for a zero-day exploit. Likewise for my own productive output: the only code guaranteed to be bug free is the absence of code.
For any computer not attached to the public internet, I agree that you should be free to run whatever you want. For anything networked? That’s anarchy, and although I would like the freedom of anarchy I experienced in 2003, unfortunately I don’t like the consequences of everyone else having the freedoms of anarchy in 2020.
I don’t have any fun, easy, side-effect free, solutions.
Should we also get rid of photoshop because users could lack
practice drawing and feel frustrated while trying to improve?
After all they could just google a couple nice images and be
done with it.
Mistakes in the modern world can have devastating consequences. It’s not as simple as your computer freezing up and becoming part of a bot net. Your files will be stolen, your accounts hacked, you will lose money. Most users would gladly take protection from that as opposed to “learning” by making mistakes (getting infected).
I want to run the apps I want to run, thank you very much. No one else should have any say in that. It's my computer.