IMO you're not going far enough. The whole UNIX setuid notion is fundamentally broken to me. The ability to execute a file should logically have nothing to do with the permissions granted to you when doing so. Windows gets this right.
_If_ you turn it all the way up. The default setting "3" allows certain "approved" apps to be launched without the UAC prompt, based on what's in their manifest I think. Turn it up to "4" and it works as expected.
If you're looking for a quick way to elevate the Explorer shell, run `hh \` (the Html Help viewer) from an elevated prompt.
[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160816-00/?p=94...
There is an almost comical list of bypasses in built-in AutoElevate programs that Microsoft does not triage as security bugs because as you note they don't call UAC a security feature. I think this is a rather silly deflection that users are unlikely to understand, for good reason.
Note, in particular, that there was nothing in my comment that depended on the existence of UAC. Had I written my comment before UAC even existed (say, in the XP era), it would've been exactly the same.
Yet somehow you managed to change the subject of discussion to a very specific feature UAC, a feature that was only introduced around the Vista era and which I had not even mentioned in my comment once. Then you bashed it based on a premise that you already knew was incorrect and therefore had to put in quotes, and then continued as if the point I had been making in my comment all along was to somehow endorse the use of this controversial feature I never mentioned for a purpose that it itself had not been intended. This is not a faithful representation of what I wrote.