That's fair, but I was specifically responding to the part of OP's comment that said that compiling and installing comments was what they expected "most people" used homebrew for. I would expect the vast majority of homebrew users to be installing the built-in formulas for pretty much everything.

I do recognize that there's a bit of ambiguity around when the "compiling" happens, since even the binaries being distributed are still being compiled from homebrew's formulas. The main point I was trying to make was that there was a transition from the "compile everything on the user's local machine when installing" model that homebrew started with to "use the pre-built binaries that homebrew has compiled in advance for installing when possible if the user hasn't specifically expressed they want to compile it themselves". To be clear, I think this is a good thing, and it's a pretty huge quality of life improvement, but I've noticed a few times over the years that this change seems to have not been as widely noticed as I'd expect given how visible it seemed to me even as someone who only uses MacOS on my work machines and not my personal ones. I still sometimes get frustrated with homebrew feeling a bit slow compared to my preferred Linux package manager, but overall it's become far faster and less error-prone over the past decade, and I think it's worth calling out efforts they've taken (like pre-compiling and distributing binaries) that have made a noticeable impact.

In some ways, I think I think understanding the previous efforts they've taken might even help explain why they've chosen not to put in the effort to work around the quarantine issues (e.g. by using local signing like some other comments on this story have mentioned); they're a volunteer project that, unlike most standard package manages for Linux distros, are not in a position where they can easily influence the development of the OS features that might be useful for them. It makes sense to me that the most valuable use of their efforts would be on things that aren't swimming against the current of where MacOS is going. Getting to the point where they could have seamless binary installations at all can't have been an easy task, and the infrastructure needed for it takes additional effort beyond the local compilation model (which still exists). If cutting down on the scope in one dimension makes it easier for them to continue providing the overall feature set they have, this seems like a worthwhile tradeoff to me.

Also if you have an older version of macOS. It will try to take the compiled route for packages but also prints a stern warning that your setup is unsupported.