alt Hacker Newsi actually vividly remember when they started introducing that flow... the first time i came across it was a total knee-jerk negative reaction. unrelated to that, i switched to windows a few years later (my old imac wasnt good enough to play world of warcraft)... but when i came back to it 10+ years later, it still felt strange.
i mean its neat from a minimalism perspective, but the decision to not ship with a regular installation UI in OG macOS X came with the tradeoff of not cleanly _uninstalling_ software either. config files etc were always left over.
but i guess - as Apple keeps locking down good old macOS X in favour of forcing software to go through the Apple Store this is going away as a sideeffect?
They haven't made any more moves in that direction since the store appeared. If anything, it's use seems to have declined since then. For awhile I would download a few apps from there, but when I did a fresh install this year I didn't even think about it and got nothing from there.