I don’t think it’s gross incompetence, since they documented the steps to remove. They may have some unexpected dependency on the file? Looks mysterious from the outside.
I think the main problem is that the weak eMudhra intermediates were cross-signed by Sectigo. Certificate revokations are needed to handle this correctly.
Dropping the Sectigo root along with the eMudhra root is the easy and safe solution, and maybe this is what Apple should have done (it’s the workaround they recommend!). But it means that some small percentage of certificates that are fine won’t be accepted.
People would have to use it in some drastic catastrophic way for them to force it out in an update, which they might push it out in the next macOS update, which don't come nearly as frequently as Windows bloatware updates do.
This seems important enough to just send out a patch update that removes the cert and does nothing else. But apparently at least a couple people at Apple disagree; or, something I'm not familiar with makes that type of update impossible.
I mean, I agree with you, I'm just basing my thoughts of what I've seen managers at different companies prioritize as "important" even when engineers cry that a security issue should be of higher priority...
You have to admit that “just a quick patch” isn’t automatically low-risk. You could cause a large blast radius if you rush any patch out without proper testing.
I agree 100%, but I keep going back to the blast radius of a compromised CA and my gut instinct is still "get rid of it and push a hotfix" but I completely acknowledge it's a lot more complicated to ship a MacOS update than just branch off of master and push a new commit, and my experience is almost entirely the latter.
I don’t think it’s gross incompetence, since they documented the steps to remove. They may have some unexpected dependency on the file? Looks mysterious from the outside.