Agreed, this isnt a datapoint. And I have an app called Loopback by Rogue Amoeba that does this job very well. There are plenty of reasons that you could assume OSX doesnt include this natively. The biggest I can think of is if you can capture streaming audio at no quality loss then you kinda blow up some business models.

I dont hear any detailed descriptions of how the software quality has declined. What I generally see is bugs being reported which is then called evidence that apple software is bad. I think the UMN story has shown that all OS software is large, complex and bug ridden.

I personally dont love how OSX is becoming more of a walled garden, but I also think that given the fact that bad people exist to make sure we cant have anything nice its a reasonable reaction to try and make the OS more secure. The days of the OS is your playground are ending. I wish that werent true but there are crappy folks out there that want to steal your data, identity, scam you, commit computer crimes against you.

I will reiterate that I think Big Sur was probably the smoothest big release of MacOS Ive been through(since Tiger). Others may have different experiences, but I can only speak to mine.

Software quality is a moving target. iOS 2.0 was exceptional quality in 2008, if a competitor released something akin to iOS 2.0 now they'd be laughed at.

Additionally, the comment was in response to a comment about audio interfaces, so it's relevant on multiple accounts.