Yes they can be. Android puts them into 'bins', e.g. all the network-related ones together. Importantly, when an app upgrades and the new version wants new permissions, these are silently granted if they are the same bin as existing granted permissions.

Therefore, from a security perspective, there are far fewer coarser permissions.

Google calls them permission groups:

https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/android/docs/referenc...

You can list all the permissions in the system, or just those an app uses or see all the "dangerous" groups from adb. For example:

     adb shell pm list permissions -g -d

Enjoy.

Not really.