Well looking at the numbers it's a preference of a very sizable group of people.

Being many or a majority doesn't necessarily mean being right though. They are completely unrelated. It's a very weak defense of Apple design choices versus KDE (or anything else).

It’s astonishing to me that one can claim that any Linux-on-PC is beautiful, polished and easy to use. I have bought a Dell XPS for an employee, which is supposed to be the best mass-market laptop before System76s which are way more expensive; and the overall experience is appalling compared to Mac:

- Before even starting, you open the laptop, the bottom stays stuck with the lid, so you raise a little more and shake it and it smashes against the desk. It’s comically unpolished experience. It requires a decade of seniority as an engineer to know that it’s a criteria that you should include to your purchase, whereas with Apple you buy any of them and the quality is uniform.

- I’ve had my macbook for 8 years and still watching movies on batteries, not a single PC laptop can reach such performance.

- It would wake up at the office and play my employee’s music, and I don’t have his password and the sound buttons don’t work without login. Why oh why?

- The GRUB at startup and the workflow for full disk encryption… What is there to defend on the polishing of the various Linux experience?

If you have to be an expert to know that some distribution or another is better, then it’s not an expertise I want to be good at. My job is delivering experiences to my own customers, and software needs to get out of the way.

True, but it is a decent argument against "it is just your personal preference".

When it comes to to usability they are not completely unrelated

A very sizable group of people is not making an explicit choice between MacOS defaults or KDE defaults. There's a lot more going on here to make this claim.