Well, the original intent was to ask the user for permission at installation time, which turned out to be a poor idea after a while. Perhaps you mean that it would have been simple to change the API in some particular way, while retaining compatibility with existing apps? If I remember the timeline correctly, which is far from certain, this happened around the same time as Android passed 100k apps, so a fairly strong compatibility requirement.
I mean, just make it "Granted" by default and give user ability to control it. Permissions API was already broken few times(i.e. Location for bluetooth and granular Files permissions)
