[throwawaysysd]

>Please don't speak for everyone. It's exactly this patronizing we-know-better-than-you attitude that makes users hate their corporate software vendors.

I'm not speaking of corporations here, this is basically every current desktop environment that is shipping on Linux right now. They are all either using polkit or they use something very similar to it because the idea of it (user asks to perform an action, show a prompt) is very straightforward and pretty much universal for GUIs by now. Some of them may be business-oriented but some aren't. If this doesn't fit the definition of "everyone" using desktop Linux then who else are you considering? And just to clarify, I would say using sudo with a fine-grained config is roughly equivalent to polkit, although less convenient for GUI users because it doesn't have pluggable authentication agents.

>I knew someone would immediately reply with this straw man as soon as they saw mention of old Windows. I said user policies are pointless for a single-user desktop.

This itself is a strawman though. Polkit and sudo and such are not strictly about user policies although you can use them for that.