> With fewer nix users on macOS, it's more likely you'll run into software which isn't in the binary cache, & so will compile from source.

This isn't necessarily true, unless the package happened to fail to build on Hydra, or it just hasn't been built yet. (Every package is built for every platform that has builders in Hydra, it's not a matter of maintenance unless it just doesn't build.)

Does brew do this differently? I thought they also automatically compile every package.