Holy Shit. That should be illegal. All it needs is one rogue employee to potentially steal trade secrets? And dont tell me MS employees never go rogue after the recent events...
The behavior documented there is on FIRST run of a new executable.
You can like that behavior or find it unacceptable, but the issue in OP is not that, it was applying to executables that had already been launched plenty of times on the machine.
Right. The recent problem (in top-level OP, and that you were presumably experiencing) was not just first run, but the behavior explained at the GP link (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23281564 , HN thread for https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/catalina-executables.htm...) is just about first-run, so the behavior explained at the GP link is not sufficient explanation for the recent problem, it's not talking about the same thing.