Hidepid breaks KDE Polkit Authentication Agent

If you recently enabled hidepid, you may have noticed some weird errors when opening applications that require super user permissions.
TECH ·

As a part of hardening your Linux, you may enable hidepid option for /proc. But this breaks the interactive authentication provided by the KDE Polkit Authentication Agent. KDE Plasma no longer asks for sudo password.

Symptoms

Error enabling firewall: Interactive authentication required.

Scanning for errors in journalctl for firewalld, you may find -

May 11 20:22:03 arch kcmshell5[6935]: firewalld.client: Job Error:  100 "Interactive authentication required."
May 11 20:22:44 arch kcmshell5[6966]: firewalld.client: Job Error:  100 "Interactive authentication required."

The interactive authentication window is generated by polkit-kde-authentication-agent. It fails to start. Looking into journalctl shows the below error -

May 11 20:05:34 arch polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1[709]: "Cannot create unix session: No session for pid 709" 
May 11 20:05:34 arch polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1[709]: "Cannot register authentication agent!" 
May 11 20:05:34 arch polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1[709]: Authentication agent result: false 
May 11 20:05:34 arch polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1[709]: Couldn't register listener!

The easiest solution is to disable hidepid for /proc again.