[throwawaysysd]

>is way too complex for the given functionality, and is completely unneeded in the first place--yes, get rid of the damn thing. Unless of course you enjoy getting "your" system OWNED and dominated by bad actors.

This is a rather nonsense statement. Polkit (or something like it) is needed if you want to have those macOS-style "program A wants to have permission to access privileged resource B" security prompts in the GUI. It's about as complicated as any similar solution needs to be for that use case. Perhaps you find these to be annoying and you disable them so they always succeed, but with that you've effectively given every program permanent suid root access. Definitely simpler, but can you say it's less of a security nightmare? I wouldn't. Yes there are risks of vulnerabilities in any security layer, but without them you've got no security layer at all.

[trasz]

Erm, it’s the other way - if you disable it, those checks would always fail, because the component responsible for elevating permissions is missing.

And, honesty, I don’t see how those prompts (or functionality they gate) make the system more useful.

[throwawaysysd]

If those checks always fail, you've now lost that functionality to do anything requiring elevated permissions and made your system less useful. You could get it back by installing a suid root tool like sudo/doas but that opens the same hole again that elevates these problems from a crash into a CVE.

[skeptical1]

I don't want or need popup permission prompts. If something needs to run as root, I run it as root from the console, as God intended. In the process I am assuredly avoiding all sorts of potential security vulnerabilities, such as this polkit code which is not installed on my system. Now get off my lawn.