>instead require the user to manually go into settings to turn them on, but if they do then it's still possible
They clearly addressed this option in the post, under sufficient social engineering pressure these settings will easily be circumvented. You'd need at least a 24h timeout or similar to mitigate the social pressure.
>I'm not really sure what to do. Maybe this MacBook Pro was just a one-off, and I have to go back to buying Windows laptops and putting Linux on them. But they just aren't as nice.
Why would you think that? They're working hard on upstreaming all patches ATM, adding new hardware support will be much easier afterwards.
I'd love to use Wayland, but having to use proprietary nvidia drivers for performance and working screen sharing via Firefox, Chrome, Zoom and Teamviewer force me to stay with X11 for some time. Though there's much progress on the Chrome Firefox front I fear it will take some time until proprietary apps will follow.