[Closi]

Dragging downloads into the applications folder is 100% amazing imo!

It's because conceptually everything is supposed to be a standalone executable.

The windows alternative is random installers that put files all over your machine and then questionable uninstallers that still leave half the files discarded everywhere.

[sagacity]

Except a lot of applications aren't standalone executables, they leave a bunch of configuration data that doesn't get uninstalled.

[seec]

But they don't know that so they don't care. macOS is very appealing to authoritarian control freak because they have the impression of being "in control", ofc the reality is quite different.

One particularly dumb thing is that apps sometimes have various assets that will be modified or used as template/whatever in their App Bundle and this get copied to their Application Support folder, so there is no application install process per se, but it does get done at first launch, and now you are wasting hard drive space just to store files that got duplicated somewhere else. macOS/iOS App Bundles are extremely large for many cumulative reasons like that. I will note that Apple has no interest whatsoever in improving the situation considering how much they charge for storage...