“Your phone is infected. Click here to load our antivirus”
The people whom for such exploits would be dangerous won’t be able to follow the 6 steps to enable them.
If applications suddenly drop out of the App Store (horrendously unlikely) and force you to install them via sideloading, don't do it. It's entirely your prerogative.
Plus, I imagine Apple is going to make it quite involved to actually sideload anything. I think the old people in your life (incidentally, I know a lot more tech savvy older people than younger people, but that's neither here nor there) are safe from the nefarious clutches of added freedom.
> I'll literally pay extra for a locked-down phone.
if not, why just lockdown phones and not pcs?
Depending on how exactly this is done, it might yet be safe: we can have multiple roots of trust, multi multiple app stores, etc.
I'm nostalgic for the bygone days when I didn't feel even slightly concerned about spyware because no bank cards were stored on my device and tech companies didn't phone home so routinely that the EU nations unified their existing legislation into GDPR in a vain attempt to try to get them to stop.
But I don't see those days returning short of a Butlerian Jihad against anything post-2002.
I also want a locked-down phone with no ability to sideload.
If you want only Apple "approved" apps, well you can still do that and you lose nothing. You can't really complain about side load only apps that aren't Apple approved then, because that is exactly what you want. But keep in mind this is orthogonal to the "locked down" level of your phone.