To me it feels weird to use binaries from outside the repos, period. On Windows double clicking an exe file feels natural. On Linux "chmod +x something && ./something" is icky.
Isn't that just because the system is less structured in general, so you've been beaten into submission?
After spending years on Linux pretty much everything on Windows feels like it's potentially spewing ick all over the place (registry, arbitrary folders, etc, not to mention the lack of reproducibility)!
Windows is moving towards apps living only in their own little containers, nice little isolated folders that they can't write outside of, with the exception of their reserved folder in AppData.
In contrast, *nix bunches executables up en-masse into a handful of folders.
It likely comes down largely to what you are used to.
The best at isolation has historically been macis, and then again you have plenty of packages installing to /Library, kernel extensions, uninstallers being placed in Applications/Utilities, MS updater being placed in /System and so on
Plus the other half which is the whole proprietary binary side of things. IMO, lack of transparency invites more bad behavior.
Also, it is actually quite trivial bypassing UAC prompt in Windows. It simply gives a false sense of security.
Something as simple as SilentCleanup [1] still works to this day. This will bypass UAC with little effort.
Even worse, following that, it is also trivial to get NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM using Windows Management Instrumentation Event Subscription. [2]
I've done it as an exercise in Go out of all languages and it ended up fully undetected both on disk and during runtime.
So Windows simply provides a false sense of security. After all Microsoft themselves said [3]:
One important thing to know is that UAC
is not a security boundary. UAC helps people
be more secure, but it is not a cure all.
UAC helps most by being the prompt before
software is installed.
[1] https://enigma0x3.net/2016/07/22/bypassing-uac-on-windows-10...
[2] https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1084/
[3] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/e7/2009/02/05/update-on-uac...