I guess macOS' window management is bad enough that treating it as a pile of paper is the only way to manage.

I find Spaces/Expose/Mission Control (or whatever they call it these days) way more comfortable than dealing with Windows. I especially like that if I hide a window, it doesn't pop up when using Mission Control. Opening the Windows equivalent shows me every window, even stuff I minimized/hid. It feels cluttered.

I don't see how alt-tabbing through maximized windows on macOS is different from Windows and Linux like the OP is suggesting. Though I do keep my browser at half-width on my ultrawide monitor because it's somewhat of an exotic/untested aspect ratio for websites.

Also any power user that cares will use a tool like Divvy on macOS for arranging windows with hotkeys.

For one, if you have multiple max-size windows of a single application in Mac OS X, alt-tab doesn't go between those windows. command-tab does.

Alt-tab goes between applications

> I've noticed Windows and Linux users tend to keep their windows fully maximized

Interesting, I've noticed the exact opposite. Mac devs, especially younger ones, tend to have full-screen IDEs and browsers and constantly flick back and forth between apps. My theory was always that Windows and Linux users had gotten comfortable with the desktop metaphor while a large percentage of newer Mac users grew up using iPads which were all full-screen, all the time.

Quick note I perhaps should have clarified, I wasn't thinking about the Mac's "full screen mode". This was something I noticed about other students in my high school a decade ago (why it's coming to mind now, I have no idea), before full screen mode existed on Mac.

It used to be that if you clicked the green button on Mac, most apps (not all apps, for weird aqua-UI reasons, but certainly web browsers) would grow to fill the screen without outright hiding the menu bar and dock, just like the maximize button on Windows.

My experience pre-full screen on macs was that the green button would do just about any random thing except make the window fill the screen. It would certainly change, usually it would fill vertically (but not always) but almost never horizontally.

To this day I still rarely press that button because of years of it doing nothing but unpredictable nonsense.