Long time ago I used macOS, but aren't you confusing things here? Yes, you need admin permission to put stuff in /Applications, but that doesn't mean the applications inside of /Applications get root access by default, or even in any other mean that applications located elsewhere. Am I getting that wrong?
Honestly, I don't know! I should write an app and see who it runs as. I did an `ls -l /Applications`, and while every file is owned by `root`, none has the `suid` bit set.
LM Studio doesn't have an installer. Those often have to run as admin, and who knows what they're doing then, so that probably wrongly set my concerns about putting stuff in /Applications/.
I'll dig around the interwebs and see if this is answered elsewhere.
