I have a crazy idea: what if we held people responsible for their own mistakes, instead of turning the world into a padded room? You messed up your password? Reset it. You have a virus / XSS that is slurping the clipboard? It's probably logging keystrokes too, and that's not the devs problem (well, XSS is, but blocking paste isn't the solution)
I agree that the security theater is annoying, and uselsess, but I think you are drawing the wrong conclusion.
Sometime in the 1960s we realized that we can't reduce fatal car accidents by "holding people accountable for their own mistakes". We actually have to make cars safer.
That's different, people can't learn from fatal accidents. They do learn not to ignore the "check oil" indicator though, we don't need to disable the engine to make people pay attention to that. This is acceptable, even if it costs the occasional fool an engine.
Why do you want to punish people even more instead of trying to educate them and help them? You and me probably do not make mistakes in this subject: but we have to admit we are both lucky and got enough education/insights to be able to handle security 'right'. Most of the population are not that lucky.
Forcing users to type out passwords does not educate them, or even encourage good habits. All it does is frustrate people who already have good password management habits, and encourage those who don't to keep (re-)using passwords that are easy to remember and quick to type.
This is one of those appealing-in-theory philosophies that comes up all the time. But you're ignoring the costs.
For the whole of human civilization, generation n-2 can complain that generation n is turning the world into a padded room. E.g., if you have a car, you expect it to just start at the press of a button or the turn of a key. But starting the Model T required physical strength and an intimate knowledge of the engine:
People who grew up on the Model T surely bitched about how later cars were making whippersnappers soft, what with their electrical starters and things just working reliably. But nobody today would say, "back to Model Ts so we can toughen up and really learn how internal combustion engines work". We have better things to do. Very smart car designers have made it so that we mostly can just get in and go. Soon, we'll just get in and the car will do the going.
That's what technology is for: We solve problems so other people can do what really matters to them. There is no sense in stopping now and saying, "Fuck it, 5000 years of technological progress is good enough."
