I have barely any experience with macOS, but could an application perform those steps on a user's behalf if it were granted Accessibility access?

Every app I've installed that wants accessibility access follows the same steps from the comment you replied to. You must explicitly unlock that pane with your password after clicking the lock and then enable the app to have accessibility access.

It's also possible to detect input events from accessibility. Little Snitch detects and ignores those events (tested via "Synergy" - a keyboard/mouse sharing application), as does the download icon that appears in the upper right corner of iBooks (I don't know why).

The accessibility preferences panel appears to accept those synthetic events, however.

> If you blindly click buttons you will not accidentally enable a kernel extension.

As someone who's gone poking around system internals for twenty-plus years... I can tell you that you're very wrong here. I've forgotten about more completely broken operating systems than I care to discuss, but many of them have ended with me poking around and blindly clicking buttons in a vain hope of getting the OS to do what I want it to do which is apparently frequently different from whatever OS producers want me to do.

You may want to use the workflow yourself to see how it differs and re-evaluate. It surprised me.