Less is safer: How Obsidian reduces the risk of supply chain attacks

This is one way to look at it, but ignores the fact that most users use third party community plugins.

Obsidian has a truly terrible security model for plugins. As I realized while building my own, Obsidian plugins have full, unrestricted access to all files in the vault.

Obsidian could've instead opted to be more 'batteries-included', at the cost of more development effort, but instead leaves this to the community, which in turn increases the attack surface significantly.

Or it could have a browser extension like manifest that declares all permissions used by the plugin, where attempting to access a permission that's not granted gets blocked.

Both of these approaches would've led to more real security to end users than "we have few third party dependencies".

Funny enough, I thought this earlier about Arch Linux and it's deritives. It was mentioned on reddit that they operate on a small budget. A maintainer replied that they have very low overhead, and the first thought that popped into my mind was that most of the software I use and rely on comes from the AUR, which relies on the user to manage their own security.

If engineers can't even manage their own security, why are we expecting users to do so?