Exactly. Creative Cloud launcher digs its greedy fingers deep in your system, running hundreds of processes and constantly phoning home. It’s the model I point to when people say they want alternate app stores. I would much rather download apps individually from the App Store, or at worst a dmg.

It would be fantastic for an OS to mandate a particular type of installation (oh how I miss dragging app packages from a .dmg into my Application directory & being done with it) while preventing anything else.

A lot of desktop software devs are averse to anything but old style full access to everything all the time, but yes I agree. Most software has no good reason to put files anywhere outside of its own application bundle and ~/Library/Application Support/<Program Name>/.