It's a fundamentally bad idea to have a single key that applications are supposed to look for in a particular place, and then use to sign things. There is inherent complexity involved in making multi-context key use safe, and it's better to just avoid it architecturally.
Keys (even quantum safe) are small enough that having one per application is not a problem at all. If an application needs multi-context, they can handle it themselves. If they do it badly, the damage is contained to that application. If someone really wants to make an application that just signs keys for other applications to say "this is John Smith's key for git" and "this is John Smith's key for email" then they could do that. Such an application would not need to concern itself with permissions for other applications calling into it. The user could just copy and paste public keys, or fingerprints when they want to attest to their identity in a specific application.
The keyring circus (which is how GPG most commonly intrudes into my life) is crazy too. All these applications insist on connecting to some kind of GPG keyring instead of just writing the secrets to the filesystem in their own local storage. The disk is fully encrypted, and applications should be isolated from one another. Nothing is really being accomplished by requiring the complexity of yet another program to "extra encrypt" things before writing them to disk.
I'm sure these bad ideas come from the busy work invented in corporate "security" circles, which invent complexity to keep people employed without any regard for an actual threat model.
> The disk is fully encrypted, and applications should be isolated from one another.
For most apps on non-mobile devices, there isn't filesystem isolation between apps. Disk/device-level encryption solves for a totally different threat model; Apple/Microsoft/Google all ship encrypted storage for secrets (Keychain, Credential Manager, etc), because restricting key material access within the OS has merit.
> I'm sure these bad ideas come from the busy work invented in corporate "security" circles, which invent complexity to keep people employed without any regard for an actual threat model.
Basically everything in PGP/GPG predates the existence of "corporate security circles".