You... can, you know. Do you actually use MacOS, or is this just something you heard on the internet? If you're using MacOS, and have somehow not found this yet, right-click on the offending app, click open, accept the "this may eat your computer" warning dialog. You'll only have to do this once per app.
This workaround does not work on unsigned arm64 app bundles on an Apple Silicon device. Yes, there are workarounds on the developer side such as signing with a self-signed certificate. The user who downloaded it could even sign it themselves.
But regardless of holes and backdoors in the gatekeeper system, the point is that you can't download an unsigned, native binary from the internet and run it on a modern (apple silicon) device with a user override. Not anymore. You have to sign binaries in order for users to be able to override-launch on their own systems. Gatekeeper will stop any unsigned binaries from the internet from being run, full-stop.
And yes, I'm both a user of macOS and an open-source software maintainer. One of my apps has releases built using a cross-compiler on linux, with a reproducible build configuration that was tricky to get setup and hadn't been updated to handle code signing. When M1 devices came out we had to go through the painful process of replicating a lot of the Apple codesign tooling on Linux so that we could apply signatures from within the reproducible build environment, just to enable to the user to right-click override like they used to.
They are delusional and will defend the Apple trillion corp to the death for some reason. Actually, the reality is that they don't want to come to terms with it.
Because while Apple pretend to be operating in good faith, they have been hard at work to make sure nothing they do not approve of can be run on their hardware. No matter what some fools like to think.
There is a greedy money related part but it also has a lot to do with dystopian authoritarian views "I know better" that are very common among the boomers currently running Apple.
In french my mother would say that those peoples are "nigauds" (dense/thick) which I find pretty fitting.
