The desktop distribution model was awful. I wasted many many hours in the past cleaning crapware from family PCs.

To be fair, complain about your family, not the desktop model. Its like babyproofing, the equivalent of no one beeing allowed to buy a steakknife because some people are not grown up enough to handle one carefully.

edit: Its ofcourse a difficult subject, like with your parents getting too old to drive and not recognizing it, but after all not a technical but a societal problem.

From talks with colleagues I concluded that these issues were widespread enough to conclude that problem was not my family but the desktop distribution model.

Its definitely widespread, I didnt want to imply it was just your family. There is a large group that cant handle admin rights responsibly. I just dont think general restrictions are in order here. We should much rather educate this group instead of giving up ownership over our devices. Especially since we dont have the appstore model out of security considerations, but because monopolists want to keep people in walled gardens. Ownership of your device is to great of a good to give it up in the name of security.

And society fixed it by voting for the vendors that baby proofed the devices.

Because people don’t want to spend hours uninstalling malware their devices.

It does, you can download an apk and install it on Android.

Don't you have to enable some kind of global special access right? So it's not the same thing.

Yes, and its super hard now. When I installed the new android version the only way I could get fdroid installed was flashing it as a system app in the recovery.

You have to do that on Windows and macOS now as well...

I haven't had to enable some global setting to allow unknown programs on Windows 10. What are you referring to?

Last time I did a fresh install of Windows 10 Home I had to go into Apps & features and disable "Allow apps from the Store only" in order to install Chrome. Didn't seem to have to do that on Windows 10 Pro.