I was at CERN when they visited us with the same type of sales pitch, but I always saw it as an attempt to get people to buy Macs than anything else, specially after how things went with Copland.
The real Apple culture was Object Pascal, Common Lisp, Hypercard, Dylan, Newton, MacApp, PowerPlant, QuickDraw,...
Now they have money and they actually need is macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS developers, not UNIX developers deploying code on GNU/Linux servers.
I have no delusions about Apple culture. But apparently you're forgetting that Apple heavily marketed OSX's association with UNIX after the merge with NeXT, and that it made a lot of noise about how the Mac would be the best UNIX workstation ever.
I lived through those years and saw the same presentations you mentioned - some on VHS tapes that were shipped to us after the events. There was no toying about OSX as a workstation, it was even on the sales pitch guides.