As a Mac user, this also bugged me. One thing that helped was to...

    brew install coreutils

... and then adding gnubin to my path so I can use them without the "g" prefix:

    PATH="/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin:$PATH"

Now I no longer have to remember idiosyncrasies of the macOS versions, such as:

    # macOS
    cp -R

    # Linux
    cp -r