Eye-opening findings. After reading the article I revoked every folder permission and tested: Insent still reads Documents even when the UI shows "None". This is a serious trust failure; transparency is supposed to be the whole point of those preference panes.
Don’t applications running under your user account have access to your user’s home folder by default?
The entire point of macOS's TCC was supposed to be to make that not the case anymore.
No. You get prompted something like “Application wants access to your Documents folder” and “Application wants access to your Downloads folder” on first attempt of each folder.
The article seems to be saying that is true unless you implicitly and somewhat invisibly grant access via the file picker.