Even though I set the default permission level for new players to be visitor, many of them still have member permissions upon joining which would only revert to visitor after leaving and joining back. This breaches the safety of many realms as players can simply join and grief the realm right away, regardless of the permission level.
You can fix the issue by downloading the realm, Opening the world with Universal Minecraft Editor or MCCToolchest, open the level.dat of that world, change permissionsLevel and playerPermissionsLevel from 0 to 1, and finally upload the world to the realm.