Usually they weren't illogical but they were hard to understand for the user. Bluetooth scanning for example requires the location permission for example, which seems illogical until you find out that advertisers worked out they could put bluetooth beacons all over the place and track the users location by checking which beacons are in range.

So apps have to request all these scary permissions so they can do regular things. But there is really no alternative.

One example I remember is that music players used to require reading the phone status in order to be able to pause playback during a call. I think these days you can mostly get by using the audio focus APIs instead, but historically that wasn't the case.