Windows was mostly the same with ARM too for most people honestly.

In our industry, lots of people got ARM surface laptops (and didn't even know it was an ARM CPU, except that the software we used had an old version of OpenVPN, which caused a specific issue unless they manually installed as it was a kernel module). The reason the ARM changeover might have seemed seamless, is that developers were likely given priority access to hardware (as what happened with PPC -> Intel).. On Windows there was special hardware for it, and I suspect there was a Arm development kit on MacOS too probably.

People also seem to compare Apple hardware against PC hardware which costs 1/2 the price too. I owned a Power MAC, Mac Pro and Mac Studio. The Mac Pro ram alone cost more than a FASTER PC as the first gen used Fully Buffered ECC RAM.

Developers can optimise for Apple based on whats available though . The other big advantage Apple has is that they mostly control the service process, and, you can't bite the hand that feeds if you are one, which controls bad press too.

And when they use another architecture, nobody seems to cross compare gaming performance as much, etc, as the biggest MAC sites also tend to be apple "exclusive" sites, and I'm willing to bet the people that operate them are shareholders.. Apple have always been behind in graphics performance (and, still are. The M1's and M2's didn't even have hardware raytracing as an example, whilst even the Intel Iris chips did).

However, by the way people talk about Apple, you'd think the M series CPU's were absolutely smashing PC performance and they were even expecting the M5 chips to compete with the GTX 4080's a few months ago.