Permissions to Subfolder not granting acces to parent

This needs to be fixed. It's a massive security concern having to basically provide a team member access to an entire parent folder then painstakingly remove access to every subfolder you don't want that user to see, not to mention it's extremely time consuming.

I understand SharePoint assigns permissions from the top down through inheritance, but surely it's not hard to provide a base level read-only permission which applies itself ONLY to the parent folders in that particular folder tree when a user is added to a sub-folder, rather than opening up the whole folder tree and hoping you remove the user from any sensitive information before the library syncs with their desktop OneDrive application.