I'm also a bit into UI design, so I have the questionable capability of seeing where each OS has effort put into its UI. When I first tried MacOS in a VM, I saw right away that it was made for people and not some abstract users. Apple's designers actually know more than a little about design, while MS struggles with basic stuff like the principles of grouping. (How basic? Well you can make a good design in black and white with just these principles and nothing else.) Microsoft's design paradigm since the nineties until Win10 was to cram as much stuff as possible onto the screen, with no regard to how people will have to use that.

And naturally, the control panel, the litmus test of an OS' design, had ten different styles of windows in Windows 7. And two entirely different control panel designs in Win10.

With Linux, of course, it's a toss as to whether any given environment has some design sense. KDE started as 'Windows, but even more so': they've managed to be even more busy with hundreds of options and dialogs. Gnome 2 unabashedly stole good stuff from MacOS, until they threw it all away in Gnome 3. Cinnamon still lacks some little details that make MacOS so damn good: e.g. the fact that you can adjust the volume in 1/4th increments in Mac by pressing alt-shift and volume up/down.

MacOS is actually great if you treat is as a desktop environment and nothing else. Buy a used Macbook Pro, don't buy other Apple devices, don't use the 'Apple ecosystem', just use the same open-source apps that you would in Linux or Windows, plus some more for tweaking the UI, and a couple paid apps that are better than alternatives. You get a rock-solid DE.