I'm asking because I'm assuming your real issues are with your stated reasons, since MacPorts is a "proper package manager" (being ported from one of the BSDs) and if you don't like that one, Brew is certainly popular. And I've never directly benefited from Linux being an "open operating system", since I don't write code that interacts with anything lower-level than the C API, but macOS' Darwin kernel and many of the binaries are open source.

I'm kind of old-school (my intro to Unix was a DECStation), and I find macOS to be plenty Unixy. If I'm not using Xcode I'm using Emacs (in VI mode). I've never said "I wish I had <Linux feature>"; actually, it's been rather nice that my Wifi doesn't break, I don't have to deal with PulseAudio, it goes to sleep--and wakes up!--when I open and close the lid, the UI is unified, networking is easy to use, etc. However, if you run the Linux GUI applications on macOS it's a klunky experience, so you benefit from finding native applications. Also, Docker wasn't very pleasant, but that might have just been Docker; fortunately I've only had to use it for one project.

As someone who loves the macOS + Unix experience, I'm just curious what workflow it doesn't work well with.

Maybe it's just different strokes for different folks, but I'd much rather just clone my dotfiles and have a Linux workspace up and running in ~10 minutes tops. Moving my workflow over to MacOS feels like trying to board a plane while it's taking off, and it doesn't bode well for my productivity when I can't rely on my tools even showing up in the first place.

If you really want an apt-get (never used pacman) kind of everything-repository experience, though, you're going to be disappointed on any system that doesn't prioritize a centralized repository of software. In practice, this eliminates a commercial OS, and probably commercial software, since there's no effective way to get a central repository. The App Store is the closest, but then you get people complaining you're the gatekeeper, or you get a free-for-all like Google Play. I think Linux manages only because the number of people that use it are small enough that bad actors go elsewhere.

As a chip, the M1 is an absolutely amazing.

Sure, it is an amazing chip. But the delta is only large compared to the rehashed 14nm Intel chips that Macs shipped with in the last few years. Recent Ryzen-based APUs are in a similar ballpark as M1's performance-wise.

I think that a lot of Mac users overestimate the M1, since their only experience with x86_64 is low-point Intel and not peak AMD.

You know Intel's in hot water when AMD makes a better Intel chip than Intel does, though...

Same here. I used Macs since 2007 and the M1 MacBook Air basically ended my Mac tenure. The M1 felt like yet another step towards making the Mac more closed. The M1 is another case of Apple breaking a lot of backward compatibility and using the community to fix it for free (who needs a working Fortran compiler, to compile their BLAS and other numeric libraries?). Even though the M1 Macs feels a lot faster than the Intel Macs, macOS still feels tediously slow compared to Linux. Then there are a lot of low-level tools on Linux which do not have good equivalents on macOS (e.g. perf). And then there is the issue (unrelated to M1) that every good MacOS application is slowly switching to a subscription model, which only extends the feeling that I don't own my machine anymore.

I returned my M1 Air and bought a Ryzen-based ThinkPad, upgraded it to 32GB RAM, and I am very happy with. I am now selling my old Intel MacBook Air, which was my last Mac.

There's a certain amount of hubris in this, in that (at least until AMD came along), pretty much every single Intel chip has only made Intel money, while ARM is broadly-licensed and is ripe for a surge. All Apple did was create an ARM-compatible chip, which is how someone already got Linux running on it: https://corellium.com/blog/linux-m1

Here's ARM themselves on their licensing model: https://www.arm.com/why-arm/how-licensing-works

Now, which one is more "closed", really? Near-absolute Intel hegemony that only benefits Intel, or ARM, which seems to benefit anyone who wants to tackle creating an ARM chip?

Honestly (disclosing my bias here), I hope IA64 dies in a fire in 5-10 years. It's had enough time in the limelight, Intel has rested on its laurels of late (arguably holding back progress), and its technical flaws run quite deep (another reason why the M1 seems impressive; ARM is simply a better-designed architecture from the ground up)