I think the biggest thing I can point to is how well Apple products work for the average person. I buy new ones every 2~3 years and keep N-1 as a spare. N-2 goes to someone who has asked me too many PC support questions.
Everyone I've given an apple laptop has eventually bought a new one. They bitched about the price, but they were ultimately willing to pay for it. My dad worked for IBM for many years and was not happy I "wasted money" on my first mac in college. Ten years later after him still saying that, I gave him a laptop. That was a few years ago and last month he bought a new M1 Air. Meanwhile, a number of the people he works with have converted to Apple laptops because they've seen how well his works.
But, you can also just copy your home directory on Linux for the same kinda process.
I kinda lost the thread at this point, but I was just trying to make the point the Macs aren't magically usable out of the box, at least for power users.
This is exactly the reason for the feeling of empowerment I got when I moved to FreeBSD/KDE after Mac. I didn't realise just how closed down macOS had gotten over time. This was the number one reason for my move but the extent of it still surprised me. Everything I want differently now is just easy, documented and usually even has a GUI button ready for the clicking. Whereas in macOS it's just "this is how it works, get used to it" now.
Apple is working so hard to lock the underpinnings of the OS down now and even if you can still change things to work your way you have to jump through so many hoops it becomes really annoying. And as well as that whatever option you used to get there is bound to get changed or removed without notice.
I just realized I'm not happy just going along with other people's choices. I hate 'going with the flow'. I recognise any the specific annoyances you mentioned in your post higher up in the thread.
The fact that Brew's package selection is one of the most complete that exists (I think Arch's and Gentoo's get fairly close, maybe with a few not-enabled-by-default ones added in?), is one of the main reasons I like it so much.
That only works well if macOS is in fact exactly how you like things. Because it's a lot less configurable than KDE and the whole source code thing is not an option at all :)
I agree, if you want a Mac then don't try to make Linux like one because you'll never get close enough.
You partition your computer to just try the new version as well? Pretty handy.
That said, I'm not gonna pretend that Linux is some utopia and everything works immediately. But there's no way it's worse. I have a script that takes any machine from a formatted drive to a working OS exactly how I need it, unattended, in about 20 minutes. That's extreme, but everyone at least has a list of the packages they need that they can copy paste install into the terminal as soon as the installer is done.