I think that view is a little too simplistic. There are some powers you probably just shouldn't give to governments, ever. There are some powers that are fine to give to governments, because they're unlikely to be abused, because abusing them confers little benefit to the abuser.

Then there is a third class of power, where it's useful for the government to have it, but abuse of it can be really bad. So you need to make it really hard to abuse that power. Maybe using the power requires a lot of people to agree. Maybe a list of difficult-to-forge and difficult-to-abuse conditions need to be met before that power can be used. Maybe the power is designed so a lot about how it is used ends up being public, so people can audit its use. And so on.

But I think if there's a power that is likely to be abused by government, and really hard to put checks on that (ab)use, then the government just should not have that power, no matter how useful that power might be.

The problem with assuming that last bit isn't a big deal because they're the "good guys" is that even if they genuinely are the good guys, you never know who is going to get elected during the next cycle (or the next-next, or the next-next-next, or...). They might not be the good guys, but they still get to use that power, and certainly won't pass laws to take that power away.