I take your point, but "Just Works" on Linux can be a more difficult road than maybe we often care to acknowledge. If you didn't go through the "OMG why won't my laptop suspend properly" years (which maybe still haven't left us...?), then let me tell you UGH, give me a Macbook as my Unix desktop/laptop experience.
I really think it's mostly what you're comfortable/familiar with. Mention NixOS to me and I think interesting, but it actually sounds more complicated than a Time Machine backup on a ZFS NAS to me (although probably much more elegant).
PS, if you are interested in shooting the shit about NixOS, it's actually quite neat. All the time-consuming Linux setup that people loathe can be mostly automated with a config file or two[0]. The package manager (Nix[1]) is pretty badass, and worth checking out if you are on Mac. I much prefer it to Homebrew for dependency management.
All of this is to say, everyone is going to have a different set of needs from their OS. Honestly, I agree with your "MacOS of 5-10 years ago" comment, and it's great that Linux continues to pick up the slack when MacOS "moves on" from various technologies. If I could still run Mojave, I would. Linux really does feel like the next-best thing, and with NixOS I hardly spend 3 minutes setting up my entire system (symlink /etc/nixos/ from my git repo and I'm done).
At least MacOS isn't as bad as Windows in the dev environment sense.
> Can't say as I've experienced this.
That was MacOS' estimate, in reality it only took ~4 hours. Still extremely frustrating when all I need is a 32mb git binary...