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> the right tradeoff for most consumers

It's really easy to fail to see this in the heat of things.

macOS has a feature where it puts an orange dot on the top right corner of your screen whenever your microphone is recording. That orange dot is normally part of the menu bar, and completely unobtrusive, but will still show up on top of full-screen windows (e.g. it'll show up on top of games if you're on Discord talking to friends), which is distracting as hell.

As horrendously annoying that little dot is, what's the alternative? Either you have an uncircumventable marker saying you're being recorded, or you don't. Any way to turn that thing off that doesn't involve disabling SIP would be trivial to exploit by anybody who managed to plant malicious recording software in the first place.

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They could put an LED in the bezel, like the camera indicator.
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That works great on a laptop. Less so on a Mac Studio, using non-Apple displays.
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More annoying is when you use something like SoundSource (a paid app which adds per-app volume control and input/output redirection to macOS... a feature that by all rights should be built in in any reasonable OS) you get a permanent purple dot indicating a third party tool is intercepting audio.

Again, I get it, but as a power user this kind of stuff is just infuriating.

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It's also annoying that macOS doesn't already have at least basic per-app volume mixing.

So much pain in macOS is in areas like this, trying to hack basic features back into the anemic OS.

Apple's "OS" updates typically focus on end-user applications that I don't use and never intend to. Meanwhile the core of the OS, and even the desktop environment, feels stagnant compared to many Linux distros.

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