> their silly role in the security theater of “but what if our users are dumb”

It's not security theater. If you go to Chromium settings -> Site settings -> permissions, and expand "additional permissions", you will see a total of 26 different permissions, each gated by the same generic "you want to use this" popup.

Permission popup fatigue is quite real, and not a security theater. And that's on top of the usual questions of implementation complexity etc.

They should just add a "Security Console", with black background and green text, and a simple shell interface for enabling/disabling flags that gate whether these requests are automatically denied or create a permissions popup. Anything dangerous starts disable by default.

Short of crippling capabilities to save dumb users, the best we can do is make the process scary enough that Grandma won't do it without calling her grandson first.