They were not "coasting" on anything. Everything about OS X has always been designed to protect users from the stuff Apple hasn't caught yet, because they know they can't always catch it first - and Apple has led the pack in nearly every major OS security feature of the last 25 years.

That includes "don't give the user root, and ask the user for their password before doing dangerous things" - four years before Linux distros started moving to a similar model.

Didn’t Microsoft pioneer the privilege escalation prompts in Vista in 2007? It was a joke at the time how little things would hijack the entire screen to allow seemingly mundane things. I didn’t ever use Vista personally or professionally, but macOS has become pretty bad with basically the same model.