Sparkle was around in 2006 - before the iPhone, before the Mac App Store. The original author ( Andy Matuschak ) worked at Apple for a number of years after Sparkle was being fairly well used.

See https://sparkle-project.org/about/

Yes correct, this is not my opinion (at all, in fact I think the exact opposite). My goal was to take the same arguments that we get repeatedly from iOS and apply them to the Mac. In fact, I wrote it carefully without mentioning platform-specific things so that the exact same text could apply equally whether you were talking about the macOS or iOS.

I appreciate the compliment, but I mainly just aggregated and paraphrased the arguments I've been reading over the last several week :-)

Though I honestly approached it as an attempt at the Ideological Turing Test, not just as a sarcastic or underhanded way of scoring dumb rhetorical internet points. I genuinely am interested to understand why proponents of that viewpoint on iOS wouldn't carry that over to macOS?

I've almost downvoted but yeah, this can't possibly be a serious post.

Not yet.

It’s an obvious strawman of arguments in favor of the iOS App Store.