I understand the need to fight spam, but this seems like the wrong answer that comes from somebody steeped in the Apple way of doing things. Android has been going down this road for years and unfortunately doesn't seem to be changing. I suspect the incestuous hiring/poaching between SV companies like Google and Apple lead to this sort of monoculture. Unfortunately it's us power users who suffer under this increasingly fashionable computer paternalism.
For years Google has made it harder and harder to root, which has mainly served to punish and damper enthusiasts. At the same time they've made rooting more and more necessary for legitimate people that want device freedom by blocking or locking down things like phone call recordings and other APIs.
As with so many things digital these days, it feels like one step forward, two steps back. Except the enormous size of the tech companies these days makes it seem less and less likely that a competitor can come in and actually offer some consumer choice. I worry that soon we'll be in a situation where you either submit to the lowest-common-denominator or you live in a segregated world where you can't access anything without passing attestation, and pretty much everything will require attestation.
