You'd be surprised -- unless you follow dev forums for various elements of your DE/distro.
macOS moves because it updates into a clean system as far as those configs are concerned.
In any case, it takes like 2 minutes to write a shell script to deploy your pf.conf/automount config after every such upgrade, and 1 seconds to use it. Or to look for the proper, permanent, way to do it: https://blog.scottlowe.org/2013/05/15/using-pf-on-os-x-mount...
With brew and brew mas you can also automate command line and GUI app installations, even custom font installs, among other things.
I can get up and running into a new machine in ~2 hours from a clean install with an automated shell script and get all my apps and cli apps, custom shell aliases/scripts, configuration for dev tools like VSCode and IntelliJ, documents (from TM/Dropbox) and so on.
I mean Gnome3 has removed features pretty regularly that people liked without any real discussion. I don't think that is a closed/open source thing, more of a project communication thing.
I know there are issues upgrading applications on every platform, but I think pf.conf should be treated in a very conservative manner.
like for instance:
> Every time Apple pushed an updated, my pf.conf and automount configs got broken on macOS. They either got deleted or they moved somewhere. Well, the last 2 times it just got deleted.
I mean, wtf? With open source, there is at least discussion and education about something like this.