I'm not worried about missing food notifications because they send me an email and a text (... and a fax and a hardcopy confirmation letter in the mail.)
Another sneaky behavior in Android is that categories that have yet to send a notification, which of course includes newly added auto-enabled channels, are collapsed under the 'show unused categories' button.
Notification categories are like mailing lists now. You may have unsubscribed from the daily deals email but you're still going to be auto subscribed to every new slightly modified category in perpetuity. Unless you fully disable notifications for an app (in Android at least, in my experience), new enabled by default notification categories are added all the time.
"Minimal guidance" is just vague enough to mean anything, including specifically prompting to encourage the claimed blackmailing.