Apple Approved Malware: malicious code now notarized?

Imagine we take our city - Anycity, USA, where only good, trustworthy, and honest folk live, and we simultaneously decide to replace door locks with neighborhood locks.. then the city likes the idea and sponsors us to replace neighborhood locks with town locks - locks on the few roads leading in and out of town.

Now you start the see the problem. Yes we need walls, yes we need fences, and bigger walls, and bigger fences, and the city needs more authority, and then more authority. And we have to put much more trust in the city, but they really need it in order to keep us good and honest citizens safe.

By the way, what happens if a "bad guy" from Thosepeople, USA gets in disguised in a Minivan?

This is not a one-to-one analogy I know, but again, I hope it points out the innate problem with Notarization. It just moves that one problem to Apple's lap. Meanwhile creating several more innate problems.

The verification aspect was one of the core arguments that Apple brought forward to argue that the app store would be a consumer benefit and not a monopolistic extortion scheme, as Epic had claimed. But now it looks like unrelated teams are poking holes into Apple's defense from all directions.

Plus, as the article correctly states, the resulting illusion of safety might be even more dangerous than a user who is aware of the need to be careful with stuff downloaded from the internet.