For many years, I was annoyed whenever I saw one of these “hardening” or “securing” guides (for any platform), without knowing why. But I eventually figured it out: If you have to do extra steps to your system to “harden” it or otherwise secure it, it is either a toy system not meant for production use, or it is an old system which has ossified and needs hardening because of a lack of upstream updates and maintenance. And it annoyed me because you shouldn’t be running any such systems in production anyway – “hardening” such systems is not tenable in the long run.
The fact that macOS has been neglected by Apple should not be news to anyone (earlier it was especially obvious for the Unix parts, but lately it has been all of it), but this is another sign of it.