This is exactly why I am happy to see Apple cracking down more. I will grant you that this could very much be "innocent", but it's still completely unacceptable to me as a user.
And just about every PM or founder I've ever worked with seems to think like this - when given the choice between the straightforward, obvious way to do something, and some crazy, brittle, privacy-abusing hack that might improve conversion by 5%, they'll choose the latter every time. This is a perfect example of this kind of thing, "let's just check the contents of the clipboard every 2 seconds in case the user doesn't know how to paste." It might have even been born out of real complaints from a fraction of users who really can't figure out how to paste. And somewhat depressingly, in the defense of PMs it does actually seem to work sometimes and improve conversions. And all your competitors are probably doing it already anyway. So the only way to stop this crap is for the platform itself to step in.
Another example that's also fixed in iOS 14 - Apple already provides a perfectly usable share sheet for choosing a photo, where I can look through my whole phone and pick just a single photo to give to the app. But for some crazy reason, seemingly every app wants to recreate this themselves. So they require you to give them access to your entire photo album so that they can display it back to you with a marginally different design and a different color background than the default page. Now in iOS 14, Apple is giving the user an option to just pick individual photos to share anyway, and then presumably make it appear to the app that those are all the photos you have on your phone.
Two very welcome improvements IMO.