You have a skewed view of what it’s like on Windows or macOS. I certainly haven’t paid for a bunch of crappy, trivial apps — the utilities I use are all free (and don’t upload my data to the cloud, nor make me watch ads).

And are you saying that gimp is a superior product to photoshop? It’s not like you can’t get gimp or octave on non-free OSes, but for some (good) reasons illustrators and scientists and engineers choose to pay for photoshop and matlab.