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.
Microsoft's Secure Desktop feature is actually incredibly well designed, and provides strong protect against fraudulent prompts or prompt interception attacks.
It is the default (unless they changed it in the last 2 years or so). I know for a fact that my PC and Laptop don't ask for my password and I know for a fact that I reinstalled Windows on my laptop less than 2 years ago and changed nothing regarding the UAC prompt (the closest that is even remotely close is enabling sudo in the settings).
IMHO, both are a mode of progressively penalizing developers as a mode of API obsoletion. It doesn't feel like the opportunity to fix a degradation of user experience really motivated app developers in either case.
The difference is Apple is much more likely to progressively make these legacy feature compatibility more difficult for users to configure over time, and to remove them eventually.
