I suspect that's simply not the use-case they're targeting. You're thinking of a database as simply the persistence component for your service, a means to an end. For you, the service/app/software is the thing you're trying to deliver. Where this looks useful is the cases where the data itself is the thing you're trying to deliver.

What else in life works that way?

I've had my identity stolen, and both my wife and I have been mistaken for somebody else. There ARE way to move past this condition (inline with Google Pay, apparently), but it's just done via trust. Or apathy. Or acceptable risk. Or some combination thereof. It never truly goes away.

If you're able and willing to code in your off-time, you should be doing it for the good of the Company. /s

My wife would leave me if she knew how much I love Kotlin, but I could never use it for work projects because we just could not justify expecting random inheriting developers to know Kotlin and accept its legitimacy. That constraint lifted in an instant. It's a political thing, but it really matters.

You need to have cursor focus to receive key events, right?

The clipboard, by contrast, can be continually monitored, while playing completely "by the rules", right?

The point about this "backdoor" business is that the WhatsApp client does not even give the user the chance to even make a mistake of skipping or mis-executing validation. Instead, it will just make that mistake FOR you, every time, for your convenience!

That utter failure of design, and breach of trust, enables a remote actor (the WhatsApp servers) to access secure data. So yes, it is a "backdoor".

If only some PDFs will work for them, they wouldn't accept them at all.

It is an implicit and unwitting reality of the position they are taking. I used to be one of these folks; I couldn't see the harm and hate of my own positions, thanks to the fog of ethnocentrism.