Docker-the-daemon not performing well on Mac has always struck me as a weird complaint. It's like complaining that MS-DOS FAT32 defrag doesn't work well on Linux with an ext4 volume. It's not native to the platform and uses alien features, it's cool that it works as smoothly as it does.

Meanwhile, the client works just fine and can connect to a headless machine running Linux if you don't want the cost of virtualizing the host OS. Like, if my Linux laptop were having trouble running a Mac copy of Photoshop in a Mac VM (ignore the legality) and it was really important for work and that was getting in my way, I'd... get a Mac. If Docker on Mac isn't cutting it, get a Linux box—it's not Mac-native software and you can still interact with it pretty seamlessly from the Mac.