I think the maintainers and users are choosing to dedicate their skillset to the technology that serve their purpose the best. It is not MacOS's fault, and given Apple is a trillion-dollar company, it probably doesn't need participation from a niche scientific community anyway.

I happen to be conducting a brain imaging workshop today, and so far most of the hiccups have been caused by the quarantine rules in Catalina and up. Thankfully someone found a sudo command to fix it for a some of the participants, but I regretfully had to ask the rest to find a windows/linux machine to work on.