I did a straight C++ app for MacOS but 1) I used SDL2 and 2) it was a full-screen game so no Cocoa UI needed. It was kind of fun though in a retro-computing way.
It's not. Open up any of the .c files and you'll see lots of references to Cocoa. One of the comments refers to Cocoa by name! This is using objc_msgSend to call into Cocoa. You'd have to squint your eyes pretty hard for the claim in the readme to be true. What it doesn't have is Objective-C code, which is different than not having Cocoa.
(I'm a big fan of SDL now.)