> There needs to be an easy way for end users to personally drop trust of CAs they don't need and have that decision respected and remembered.
There is. On macOS go to Keychain Access > System Roots and disable the kind of trust you want to disable. There's probably a scriptable method for that.
On Windows, open the management console to "Certificates". Then go through the list and move/remove/distrust any certificates you dislike. There are also powershell tools you can use.
On Linux, the situation is a bit annoying. You can remove all CA certificates manually and make the directory read-only to break any attempt from your distro to interfere with the list. You need to check your distro documentation to see if they use /etc/ca-certificates or /etc/ssl or something like /etc/pki for reference. Some distros offer a partial GUI as well.
Programs that deem themselves smarter than the OS (true in the case of macOS and various Linux distros), like browsers, the JVM or NodeJS applications, can have their own cert stores.
You will need to acknowledge half a dozen certificate prompts for every website you visit after this, though. Make sure to compare the fingerprints of the CA root certificate with the real ones you might find elsewhere, because it's easy to generate your own CA and copy all certificate information signed by your self-generated key.
There is. On macOS go to Keychain Access > System Roots and disable the kind of trust you want to disable. There's probably a scriptable method for that.
On Windows, open the management console to "Certificates". Then go through the list and move/remove/distrust any certificates you dislike. There are also powershell tools you can use.
On Linux, the situation is a bit annoying. You can remove all CA certificates manually and make the directory read-only to break any attempt from your distro to interfere with the list. You need to check your distro documentation to see if they use /etc/ca-certificates or /etc/ssl or something like /etc/pki for reference. Some distros offer a partial GUI as well.
Programs that deem themselves smarter than the OS (true in the case of macOS and various Linux distros), like browsers, the JVM or NodeJS applications, can have their own cert stores.
You will need to acknowledge half a dozen certificate prompts for every website you visit after this, though. Make sure to compare the fingerprints of the CA root certificate with the real ones you might find elsewhere, because it's easy to generate your own CA and copy all certificate information signed by your self-generated key.