I don't think that is contradictory either. By limiting 3rd-party permissions, Apple is able to prevent many potential issues before an application even makes it to the vetting process. The less there is to vet, the more robust the vetting process should be in theory.
Idk what their vetting includes but I doubt it's a full security audit of the codebase of each app for example and so without something like that why would you ever expect a 3p app to get the same permissions as an Apple internal one?
Personally I don't, I would just downgrade the Apple permissions to match normal apps, I'm just pointing the doublespeak
Which essentially makes the phone a brick and unusable for 99% of consumers. Average users don't care about your weird esoteric privacy and security concerns.