> Apple is incapable of having decent tethering even as they control the whole ecosystem
Are they, though? Tethering from my MacBook to my iPhone or iPad is a pretty seamless experience, to the point I don't even think about it. And sometimes I get home from a cafe and forget I'm even tethering until I notice my iPhone battery is lower than expected. And this isn't Apple, but I don't even notice I'm not on my home LAN because of tailscale.
It's definitely significantly easier than dealing with built in WWAN devices & ModemManager on my linux laptop. (Or Windows, when I used it on that same hardware.)
If your sentiment is the most common, including a modem in MacBooks makes only sense for the tiniest of tiniest of user slice, and with Apple barely cattering to pro users, I can't imagine them investing further to solve a problem that isn't as simple as just slapping an extra part in the machine (which they traditionally hate).
On my side it was 90% there, a bit lagging to connect and totally failing from time to time , once in a week perhaps, but workable otherwise. The argument on the podcast was for having a 100% great solution like it does on the iPad, assuming an internal modem on macos would rainbows and ponnies.