Or would you be OK knowing that Thunderbird you downloaded from https://thunderbird.net/ is signed by the thunderbird.net certificate owner?
The permissions approach isn't bad. I may trust Thunderbird for some things, but permission to read SMS and notifications is permission to bypass SMS 2FA for every other account using that phone number. It deserves a special gate that's very hard for a scammer to pass. The exact nature of the gate can be reasonably debated.