[eyelidlessness]

It’s partially built into the OS, in that you can move almost every first party icon into the control center (via System Settings). That probably isn’t sufficient for everyone, but it was good enough for my usage that I never bothered installing Bartender on my M2-series MBP.

[FireBeyond]

And yet people will swear blind that Apple apps don't get special treatment. Whether things like this... or the earlier days of Safari where it had access to some APIs around power-saving...

Or the most nefarious, where Apple apps were able to bypass most of the TCP/IP stack tracking and send traffic directly, regardless of any on-device filtering or firewalling, like Little Snitch.

And then they claimed it was only "a temporary measure while they dealt with updating software", but they never did explain why an app like TextEdit would have ever needed a kernel network extension in the first place.

That to me was almost certainly a post-facto attempt at justification when they were caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

[fragmede]

iirc, netcat was the truely embarrassing one that was signed and allowed to bypass firewalls

[FireBeyond]

Yeah, that's really problematic.

But I can't imagine contortions around "yeah, it's an exceptionally simple bundled text editor but trust us, it really needed that network kernel extension."