Correct. There is no other alternative. Your options are safe, useless software, or unsafe, useful software. It should be no surprise, then, that people still pick the latter in many cases. Perfectly safe and useful software doesn't exist, so you pick the tradeoffs you're comfortable with.

I mean we could make software that isn't malicious and didn't need the OS to prompt you if you want to allow the malice. But where would the money be in that?