...and now Apple has altered the deal and we must pray they do not alter it further. Disgusting. Predictable, expected, unsurprising -- but still disgusting.
That being said, Linux is available, and it's perfectly usable by people who would be bothered by Apple's dev policies.
There is a free alternative which is better in many ways and has an unlimited supply.
The only reason Apple has a lead in software is that they have made their closed source model deliver end-user benefits at a faster rate than the open source alternatives.
There is no reason this needs to remain true, and there are a lot of signs that it will not continue.
KDE is by far my preference and in general I don't think neither windows nor macos has fewer problems despite the price tag.
After hearing the "it just works" mantra of apple users for many years I was surprised to find I had at least as many glitches on the Mac as I did on KDE (win 7 was better, 10 has more problems ime).
(I use my computers for development and sysadmin, not gaming or art)
Only "free" in terms of literal monetary payments to acquire the operating system. But the choice between Apple's stack and other Linux stacks has many trade-offs in terms of time, support, documentation, complexity, transition cost, etc.
The only thing stopping those trade-offs being changed is people’s willingness to make the changes.
Based on a lot of criticism of MacOS I see here, some of that is because people don’t actually want to change the trade offs.