Maybe you're missing to foresee the future step in Apple's strategy which will make it harder if not impossible to run something like Homebrew? As far as I know there is no such thing on (non-jailbroken) iOS. Apple seems be be steering macOS in that direction, a curated platform instead of a general-purpose computing device.

You realize Apple employs engineers right? The same engineers who use homebrew for their own job? If they go down that route, it's likely they'll need to support something like homebrew or similar.

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if it just meant distributing package via homebrew means signing the package, much like any other package manager. Yes, you can get something similar with checksums, but it doesn't provide any method of authenticity of the distributor.

Is it friction? Hell yeah. A pain? Yes. Is it purely bad? No. Does it have positives? Some. It's not black and white.

If they do that, I am gone. Parent mentioned that they feared that though 10 years ago and it never really happened.

Apple seems to be trying to walk a line with MacOS and keep all of its user bases happy, but it's a hard line to walk.

Agree with you completely.

I would move to Arch or Debian.

That said, how can they lock it down? You need macOS open to develop apps for their other devices.

They can’t get rid of homebrew et al, as they’d lose their iOS developers! Don’t you agree?

The fact they explicitly have a “Dev tool” category you can use here says a lot about their approach being open for power users.