What does a "paved road" or golden-path approach to security mean at staff level, and why does it scale better than reviews?

A paved road (a.k.a. golden path) is a well-supported, secure-by-default way to build and ship software — hardened libraries, templated services, managed auth/secrets, SSO, vetted base images, and CI guardrails — so the easy path is also the secure path. It scales because security becomes a property of the platform rather than a per-project gate: thousands of engineers inherit good defaults without ever talking to AppSec. Manual reviews scale linearly with headcount; paved roads scale with adoption. The staff-level work is making the secure path more convenient than the insecure one (carrots), measuring adoption, and reserving review effort for the off-road cases that genuinely need it.