As a Mac user, I don’t feel it. I know people get really particular about this shit, but I spend roughly 4 hours every year making macOS do what I want. That’s it. When I ran Ubuntu, it was about 8-12 hours every 6 months. When I ran Windows it was... it was a lot more. Backwards compatibility isn’t as important to me as shit just working. My current setup hasn’t been changed in about 2.5 years. Early 2017 is the last time I opened system settings at all. Sure I periodically install a homebrew package or two, but I consider that to be a part of the normal workflow, not an OS tuning thing. All my other daily software and even stuff I don’t use frequently just works.

I know that sounds like I am some kind of fanboy. I assure you I am not. I wish I could go back to Ubuntu where I feel most at home. But the fact that I think so little about my OS that I forget it is there is what makes this so easy for me to stay.

> Backwards compatibility isn’t as important to me as shit just working.

Backwards compatibility is about shit working! You can't have that when a program you want to use stops working because the OS broke backwards compatibility.

I have used an iMac for a long time, every time there is a new version of the OS something breaks and in some cases there isn't a way to fix it. My 2009 iMac went through several OS upgrades and pretty much half of the installed software doesn't work anymore and in most cases i cannot even upgrade - either because i bought the software outside of MAS (which didn't exist at the time i made some of those purchases), or because the developer stopped supporting the software (including some of Apple's own software - e.g. i really like iWeb, though Apple doesn't anymore) or simply because the developer doesn't exist anymore. Or i just prefer the version i have over the version the developer would want me to use (because they bloated it up, added ads or whatever reason).

Yeah, when i first started using macOS i had pretty much the same stance as you. It went away when thing started breaking left and right over the years. There is no "shit just working" if the OS breaks said shit.

(of course in the 2009 iMac's case that isn't very relevant anymore since Apple decided a 3GHz Core 2 Duo isn't enough to run their OS, but it still happens with some newer Macs i have)

Backwards compatibility is for when software reliant on the OS isn't actively maintained. If it is, developers simply update it and it keeps working. So it depends on what you use in your stack/workflow.