What Apple is doing is significantly better. Instead of a single popup that grants access to everything and shows before the app even opens. You can granularly accept or deny individual access to things. And the program keeps working when you decline.
Okay, but permission prompts as such are not why people complained. Sure, of course you don't want apps to record your screen without permission. The problem is Apple has taken away your right to even grant this permission, for more than a week, unless they also consent (and extract a fee from the app developer). It's part of their ongoing frog-boiling campaign to remove users' freedom to run arbitrary software on Macs; this is what people object to.
You can make an argument that UAC was part of a similar strategy, but not paying for an EV certificate only results in a one-time annoyance for your users, not a continuous one. UAC is equivalent to Gatekeeper. This permissions nonsense is worse than UAC.
