I like to think of HN as contrarian, not negative. Techies are cynical by nature because the promise and reality of technology are perpetually so far apart. And if your actual job in life is to anticipate where the problems are going to surface in technology, well... the longer you live with that, you develop commensurate expectations and compensatory mental models.
What software are you having trouble getting installed?
I've never had issues with getting things from inside or outside the App Store working. Usually it's just dragging the App into the Applications folder and answering a prompt. Sometimes there is an installer. (or I use Home-brew)
Maybe you are trying to install something from a developer who doesn't sign their code or doesn't have an Apple Developer ID? I'm curious what that might be.
Several of my virtualenvs are broken on Catalina - apparently the binaries installed by my requirements.txt are not signed for use in Catalina. I had to accept an amount number of dialog boxes by hand to make that work.
There have been others, too, beyond the virtualenvs, which I do not remember offhand.
Its just that the frog is being boiled quite slowly. Apple every year is doing tiny little steps towards full control what customer can run on "their" computer and people instead of trying to stop them in their tracks, they defend them. It's bizarre and funny at the same time. Then if few years people will be crying they cannot publish software without being robbed and we will say "I told you so".
Except here we are and things are the same. I run whatever I want.
Here’s to having this same silly “argument” in 2021.