On the topic of screen recording permissions and its abuse (or lack thereof), Infostealer malware is one of the more prominent types of malware we see on macOS. Here’s a recent example that has the ability to take screenshots:
https://www.kandji.io/blog/malware-cuckoo-infostealer-spyware
These infostealers of course typically prey on unsuspecting users and, being on macOS, tend to get much less coverage than their Windows counterparts. But there are plenty of interesting delivery methods that have made these more prominent in recent years, such as SEO poisoning, malicious advertisements, or masquerading as legitimate sys admin tooling (the most scary vector in my opinion).
My Apple Photos duplicate experience was a bit distressing. It seems to be doing some kind of hashing/abstraction on the photos to verify whether they are duplicates, and as such it won't pick up on very slight differences in pictures. For example, there were some "duplicate" pictures taken on a tripod from a distance, one of which had my wife and one of which had both of us. She was sitting in the exact same position in all of them, and apparently me joining her in the picture did not change the abstraction value of it enough for Photos to recognize them as different.
There weren't many cases of this but I think I may have lost at least a couple of honeymoon photos along the way due to me trusting the process before going all in.
