You don't have to unfreeze the reports to open a new credit application - the credit app gets rejected (on hold), and the credit issuer will ask you for an auth code. You go to the appropriate agency, log in with the credentials you used when you set up the freeze, provide the request code, they respond with an auth code, you relay the auth code to the credit issuer, credit app progresess.

It basically just forces an auth flow for a credit application, which is quite sane. You can also do the whole process - enrollment and manual authorization - online. It was quite painless for me to do it a couple of years back.