MacOS has really strong userland software, stuff like the Quartz compositor is genuinely quite hard to beat (neither Windows, x11 nor Wayland can live up to it's featureset and stability).
However, MacOS as an operating system really is a mess. Especially the XNU kernel, which is still an unbelievable amalgamation of disagreeing technology. Remember, MacOS is not natively a UNIX-certified machine: all of it's UNIX compatibility comes from a BSD-based compatibility layer that hasn't really been changed since the late-90s. Oh, and the coreutils? Notoriously garbage. MacOS ships with all sorts of outdated, downgraded, vulnerable and otherwise broken shell utilities. pico instead of nano, zsh instead of modern bash... hell, even something as simple as installing git is a 700mb installation with a mandatory reboot.
I'll give MacOS credit where credit is due (Apple had good design philosophies in the 2010s), but the actual operating system (see: functional network of software components) is truly awful, arguably just as bad as Windows if not worse. Just about it's only redeeming qualities are the things that Apple didn't make (like pf and process management. If you forced me to pick something that I found impressive, I'd have to choose Grand Central Dispatch, but even that isn't terribly impressive. It's mostly as if some Apple engineers decided to iterate on the fairly lackluster Linux process management. It would have been a miracle if they managed to make something worse.
I could be wrong, last time I seriously used MacOS (for both personal/work uses) was Mojave. Either way, it's installing a lot more than just the 30mb of the git binary, so I learned my lesson and just installed all the GNU stuff with my package manager. Annoying to be sure, but somehow better than dealing with Apple's default way of handling it.
Mach 2 (and thus XNU) was built on BSD 4, which was derived directly from Bell Labs UNIX V7. It has been “natively UNIX” as long as the other ancient V7 and SysV derivatives, like AIX and SunOS.
Maybe what you really mean is you don’t like UNIX and expect it to work like Linux?
However, MacOS as an operating system really is a mess. Especially the XNU kernel, which is still an unbelievable amalgamation of disagreeing technology. Remember, MacOS is not natively a UNIX-certified machine: all of it's UNIX compatibility comes from a BSD-based compatibility layer that hasn't really been changed since the late-90s. Oh, and the coreutils? Notoriously garbage. MacOS ships with all sorts of outdated, downgraded, vulnerable and otherwise broken shell utilities. pico instead of nano, zsh instead of modern bash... hell, even something as simple as installing git is a 700mb installation with a mandatory reboot.
I'll give MacOS credit where credit is due (Apple had good design philosophies in the 2010s), but the actual operating system (see: functional network of software components) is truly awful, arguably just as bad as Windows if not worse. Just about it's only redeeming qualities are the things that Apple didn't make (like pf and process management. If you forced me to pick something that I found impressive, I'd have to choose Grand Central Dispatch, but even that isn't terribly impressive. It's mostly as if some Apple engineers decided to iterate on the fairly lackluster Linux process management. It would have been a miracle if they managed to make something worse.