By definition apple can’t do anything in that situation, because people don’t want third-party app stores and sideloading to be managed or notarized by apple at all.

This is the very definition of bad-faith motte-and-bailey argumentation, and it’s logically incoherent to boot. Get apple out of regulating apps and App Stores, no more telling developers what they can do! Oh and i guess they can tell developers to do one thing…

These apps usually simply refuse to work without permissions, so this is not a solution. Empty/fake permissions are easily detectable too. Someone will make a “framework” for that and we’ll see it in most important apps.