It's no doubt apple looking at those old-timey 'I'm a mac, I'm a PC' ads, and all of a sudden being jealous of the PC side, with utter dogpoop directory access management. Man, apple fell off a cliff (I'm still using macbooks, I'm a _little_ bitter :P).
Everybody with this problem on catalina, perhaps? Whether your app even runs into the 'you cant read files there' issue is unknown and there is as usual these days with Apple absolutely no documentation whatsoever. That makes fixing it frustrating.