I'd use Mac again, except that it tries to punish you every time you go outside the Apple box

I'll admit I haven't used a Mac for a little over 5 years now, but when I did use one this did not match my experience at all. I never had any trouble getting it to do what I wanted, and I rarely used any Apple ecosystem stuff because I was always Apple laptop + windows desktop + Android phone and needed cross-platform tools.

It's not as free as Linux for sure, but all these people talking about a walled garden feel like they've hardly used a Mac at all and are just assuming it must be similar to iOS, because nothing about my experience felt like a walled garden.