Privacy Guard in Cyanogenmod used to do this I think, at least to fake the list to be empty. It somehow still broke a tiny number of apps (unintentionally, i.e. the app owners didn't purposefully add code to annoy those users) so there seems to have been some flaw between 'empty list with permission granted' and 'empty list with permission not granted'. Regardless, I'm not sure why this didn't become mainline Android aside from that it would come with no benefits to the main developer of Android.
For backwards compatibility, they could just put in some nonsense entries. If the program can figure out those entries are nonsense, it's no longer out of date and it's on them.
Why they didn't do this by default is anyone's guess. Maybe they like app devs more than users. More technology should lie on users' behalf.
Sure sure, I was just saying that this sort of thing already existed in the past (in Cyanogenmod, and that it worked well for 99% of apps even without providing wrong data) but other vendors or even mainline Android never picked it up unfortunately.
