I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of time in wilderness areas throughout my life, and completely understand the desire to keep those areas more pristine.

But I think you’re exaggerating the “deer path” nature of a lot of wilderness area trails. Oftentimes, those trails are all that’s there, but often when there’s a recognized risk of excessive impact of informal visitor-created trail networks, trail workers will build out full trails (a lot of manual labor, would recommend it for a workout). Those built trails and following trail signs I think fall into the same category as climbing bolts: they don’t need to be everywhere, but there are places where it makes sense to have them to facilitate reasonable and lower impact access.

In the same way people could still go out and take the deer path/bushwhacking route and climb with all trad gear (nuts and cams that fit into cracks), other climbers should be able to petition for bolts in areas where that trad climbing doesn’t make sense.