> notarization has been a net negative for all parties involved

Notarization made it significantly harder to cross-compile apps for macOS from linux, which means people have to buy a lot of macOS hardware to run in CI instead of just using their existing linux CI to build mac binaries.

You also need to pay $99/year to notarize.

As such, I believe it's resulted in profit for Apple, so at least one of the parties involved has had some benefit from this setup.

Frankly I think Apple should keep going, developer licenses should cost $99 + 15% of your app's profit each year, and notarization should be a pro feature that requires a macbook pro or a mac pro to unlock.