You still end up in uncanny valley often enough, with commands that are missing, or working unexpectedly differently. It often feels like macOS could be made so much better for developers, but Apple just doesn't care because people buy their devices anyway.
The problem is that being a developer is not a synonymous with UNIX.
In deeply saddens me to think that there is a developer who has not installed gnutils and put them earlier in the PATH.
The remaining differences are related more to systems stuff - managing daemons with launchd for example. These aren't really a distraction day-to-day.
It’s not that. It’s that their lawyers won’t let the engineering side distribute gnu tools. Period.
At Apple, if you even use GPL tools in your workflow you have to seek approval, and most often there’s pushback of “why won’t this (alternative that isn’t GPL) work ?”
Their lawyers aren’t stupid, they understand the GPL and its limits, but they’re simply doing a risk assessment- which one is less risky, the GPL variant or the BSD. For a corporation, that’s generally BSD.