I ended up basically disabling all of my chat app notifications— there's enough sensitive stuff in there and I don't want some spicy meme popping up when my kid is looking over my shoulder or using my phone to play a game, or worse it's being Carplay-mirrored.
Guided access covers some of that, but I really don't think it's the whole story. Rather than locking everything to a single app, I'd rather something more like a guest session that sees all the apps, just all of them in a logged-out state... no messages, no emails, no calendar, no banking info, no history for Google Maps or open tabs/autocomplete in the browser, none of it.
But perhaps that feature is really just a subset of the broader users/profiles request that is being made here, because then I could have separate users for "primary" and "family" on my phone, and the "family" user would still enjoy continuity from session to session (game progress, previously visited YouTube videos, whatever) but in a separate universe from the continuity of the primary user.
The implication of "I wish I could hand my iPad to..." is that the person receiving the iPad would be able to use it, not just physically hold onto it.
I think that's too granular and is dependent on the apps offering Face ID as a secondary-layer authentication flow -- I think OP is suggesting an entirely different user profile that doesn't even have the same applications that the original (save for the default iPadOS apps, and even those should be logged out from your Apple ID). The cognitive overhead of "did I make sure to enable Face ID on x,y,z apps so that I can pass around my iPad without worrying about any personal data being accessible" is too high for spontaneous + casual device sharing.
Example:
"Hey uncle ping00, can I use your iPad real quick to watch something?"
"Sure nephew, <switches profile to Guest ,and hands it over> go nuts"
Guided access is for restricting access to one app. Not great for a multiuser experience. The AppleTV gets it right in a lot of ways but an iPad with faceID and/or fingerprint sensor could instantly recognize a given user and have their profile ready
Yes and no, you can limit people to one app but I would say it's too clunky to initiate and not flexible enough to really let someone borrow your tablet for a few minutes.