This used to be the case, and still is for laptop builds. For desktops, things are far more standardized now and Apple's hardware isn't much different than what is commercially available. A Z370/390 chipset with 7th-9th generation i5 or i7 processor coupled with AMD graphics and Broadcom wireless is pretty vanilla. The 7700k iMacs will be supported for a long time, so I have pretty high confidence that something with nearly identical hardware will similarly not break.

I'm actually somewhat surprised macOS does not check for the existence of a T2 chip as a precondition.

How would that work for all the hardware Apple has released and still supports that predate the T2?

For reference, the upcoming macOS Catalina still supports the following hardware:

    MacBook Pro (mid 2012 and newer)
    MacBook Air (mid 2012 and newer)
    MacBook (early 2015 and later)
    iMac (late 2012 or newer)
    iMac Pro (2017 or newer)
    Mac Pro (late 2013 or newer)
    Mac Mini (late 2012 or newer)

Apple T1 was introduced in 2016, T2 started showing up with the iMac Pro in 2017, the rest of the lineup got it in the 2018 refresh.

You're right, but at some point support will be dropped for the older Macs and an Apple proprietary security chip will be made mandatory.

DRM will kill the Hackintosh dream. How sad.

I expect that will happen once all the supported devices have a T2. That is probably some way off though as they are still selling new hardware without it, for example the recently updated iMacs.

I had the same issue with my hacintosh. (Snow leopard vintage). It worked great, was fast. But I lived in fear that some update would break it. I switched it over to linux and gave it a friend after after a couple years service.

I did like the bang for the buck.

Been running high sierra on a hackintosh for a couple years now. Of course, even my actual macbook is also on nvidia graphics (mid-2014), so next desktop will just jump over to Linux since Apple won't let Nvidia get drivers out.

I'll take that over the absurd amount of money I'd have to otherwise pay for a mac system. All so that they will graciously allow me to to develop software for their other, totally unrelated mobile OS.

OSX/MacOS and iOS are the same operating system.

They look different because they have different gui layers, but are otherwise the same.

wifi seems to the major issue this hackintosh has

On laptops: yes. On desktops there are plenty of cheap PCI-E cards available... or USB dongles.

true