I installed it at one point. There were so many things they just happened to do the same way as macOS for UX (not the windows way), it just didn't seem very original. I see in V6 they've copied the light/dark mode of macOS and put the setting in roughly the same place, with the same sort of icon. Oh, and it's right above the same set of accent colors on macOS, which also are shown as circles (not squares, or rounded rectangles, or a menu). There's a dock, not a task bar. And the finder windows are laid out roughly the same as some older version of macOS. The left sidebar looks like practically the same icons. App Center is laid out the same way as the Mac App Store. I could go on.

(I know that the dev environment is quite different)

I see a lot of criticism for eOS “copying” the Mac, and yet never see any criticism of Cinnamon for copying Windows.

If anything, the Linux community seems to cite it as a strength.

Never heard of Cinnamon, but if it copies Windows, then that's a shame too.

They seem to be taking more from Apple's take a look at the continuous mission control animations and list view context actions.

I honestly don't think these are the best of Apple's stuff. When I think about these features I can't really see why they decided they were important enough to implement. Perhaps they're trying to generate some excitement about the desktop environment I don't know.