That's certainly possible. But as someone who has been using Macs on and off for about 10 years now, I've heard people shout that Apple was locking down Macs f

That's certainly possible. But as someone who has been using Macs on and off for about 10 years now, I've heard people shout that Apple was locking down Macs from the moment the App Store was created on iOS (and long before it came to MacOS). So far, that hasn't happened. Is it possible this is the next step in a 10+ years plan to "boil the frog slowly"? Of course! Not sure how they would accomplish this without also losing the developers they need to continue making both MacOS and iOS viable platforms for users, but I guess if they just don't care and want to lock everything down, this could certainly be one more step towards their long term nefarious goal. But it also still seems like a reasonable step towards making their platform more trusted and secure for the average user while continuing to give devs and power users control. So far, I see no evidence for the former, and enough evidence for the later, that I'm not too worried.