The UI is polished, Commercial and refined Apps are available and technological it is a reasonably sound design.
I have my *nix shell with software from macports as well.
I just don't have the motivation or time anymore to make linux fit my personal computer needs, it always ends up in rabbit holes of tangles to accomplish many things and when you are actually trying to accomplish something unrelated to playing with it.
Do you think the two might be related? One is modular and configurable and ends up in rabbit holes of tangles and the other is monolithic and controlling but keeps the trains running on time?
Sure they are related. But its not black and white, and not an absolute correlation.
macOS itself is actually designed in a very modular way if you look at the message based integration of components via XPC and "do one thing" daemons.
I have accepted that I must forfeit some personal preferences in the Apple ecosystem, but I choose to draw the line with not being able to disable intrusive and privacy related features/components.
A similar complaint can be made about Windows, which is more monolithic in its design in my view, but it offers (as mentioned in my top-level comment) proper descriptions and a UI to disable services. Also there are many tools like Win10Privacy and such available which disable a lot, without making the system to constantly misbehave.
"trains on time" - While I appreciate the metaphor, when considered carefully, it is more likely linux and the pragmatic approach that makes the "trains run on time" in many fields. (embedded and server-side)
It's designed to be modular for ease of development by Apple folks. Whether they extend the benefits of that modularity to you, the user, is entirely case-by-case --
and the default answer is 'no'.
While a government that's "monolithic and controlling but keeps the trains running on time" is clearly a bad thing, it's not clear that the same holds for computers -- particularly for your average user. I'm not too concerned about Apple locking down my machine as long as I can get what I want to get done done -- and that doesn't involve making my tool conform to some ideology. I have more important things to worry about -- even more important infringements on personal freedom -- and I'd rather have my tool work adequately with as little pain as possible.
that doesn't involve making my tool conform to some ideology
The only platform that does this is iOS, which embeds an ideology that forces developers to lock down their apps even against their own wishes, and hence prevents the use of GPLv3 licensed code.
Meanwhile, the major Linux distros include all types of licenses, including proprietary.
