Yeah that's not what I meant. When you click OK on this thing, you're saying "I understand Apple hasn't vetted this application, and it could do unpleasant things to my computer"

You seem to be implicitly trusting the creator of the app, which is a mistake.

Well yes, ideally any code running on macos will have paid the requisite fees to Apple so the scary message goes away.

That being said, I'm quite confident it would be possible to both get that assurance and have the software behave in ways that are unexpected or undesirable.

Furthermore, it does appear to be open source, so you could always download a copy from github and go over the code line-by-line if you desire.

My point was that, at the point where these devs seem to be at, it's quite innocuous that they haven't paid the apple tax yet.