on windows and mac they just get a prompt and a lot of people don't read it, care, nor wonder what it's actually doing they just want it to work.

I know you all know this but companies will do this knowing that exploiting all of us.

I use Linux and agreed on all those points. when I used adobe before it wanted to charge me a fee to cancel my subscription and wouldn't let me just 'cancel' in their system so I just blocked the payments on my card and dipped out.

good software, garbage company

"C:/Program Files" is still the recommended place to install programs, and it requires admin privileges to write to. Some programs (ab)use C:\ProgramData for that purpose instead and therefore don't need admin privliges. But even with that hack, ultimately Windows still uses the https://xkcd.com/1200/ permission model. (Everything runs with full access to all your data.)