> It would be fair to assume that there are three ingredients in McDonald’s French fries: potatoes, oil, and salt.

Only if you'd been paying zero attention for the past two decades. The sugar coating is to get the nice golden brown color. We've known about that for a long time. The hydrogenation is there so things don't rot or otherwise degrade in distasteful ways. Most of the rest of the wacky ingredients are there to get that fried-in-beef-fat taste since they stopped using beef fat in their frying oil a decade or so ago. And everything's GMO nowadays.

Regardless, does anyone with any sense actually entertain the idea that McDonald's products are healthy??

TL;DR: This isn't news.