While Catalina certainly isn’t perfect, the issues are a bit overblown from my point of view. I’ve been running 3 different machines on it since release (hackintosh tower, 2017 iMac, 2015 MBP), two of which are used on a daily basis, and they’ve all been fine. The permissions prompts were annoying for the first hour after install and it’s been smooth ever since.
But my use case is almost exclusively programming and Blizzard games, so maybe the problems are centered around particular types of software or something.
Permanent data loss in multiple Apple cloud applications is the biggest issue I've seen, followed by a pretty gnarly permissions issue that I can't quite wrap my head around. But data loss and security issues are the two largest problems you can have with an OS, so really the contempt people have for Catalina is not overblown, IF they run into these issues.
There is several software that doesn't work with Catalina. In my case RingCentral meetings.
But in general people shouldn't downgrade to it... it is 100% a downgrade, as it removes features available in the previous version.
The vista prompts appeared every time an app was doing something that required elevated privileges which, back then, was all the time.
This issue is totally overblown and, TBH, I like to know what application has access to what data on my machine. If the price for that is a one-time prompt per application, I'm willing to pay that.
If you are not and you are willing to forego the security advantage, then use spctl to disable Gatekeeper
But my use case is almost exclusively programming and Blizzard games, so maybe the problems are centered around particular types of software or something.