I am not entirely against the whole notarization thing.

If it is good for the end-user, it is usually also good for the ecosystem a a whole, trust is valuable.

But ffs, they are rich enough to make this a lot less painful and hostile for developers.

And this is not a new thing, I used to develop games for iOS, from the very beginning, and while the process somewhat simplified over time, it was a huge cortisol inducing process, not to mention the regular forced OS+SDK updates where the procedures changes almost every time and could fail in not-so-evident ways.

Making it take some pain for developers is precisely what makes it valuable. If you could automate signing up for a developer account and didn’t have to put up some cash it would lose all value as a trust signal.