If you are a professional app developer (you make a living out of it) then Hackintosh is a bad alternative. It can get your developer account, and apps, banned by Apple. On top of that, you can get sued.
Multiple acquittances have been working on custom built Hackintoshes for years without _any_ issues from Apple.
Can you also provide a source? Would your acquaintances mind if you provided links to the apps they have developed with their Hackintoshes for years?
You can purchase Snow Leopard[0], Lion[1], and Mountain Lion[2] directly from the Apple Store, but Snow Leopard looks like a DVD and Lion and Mountain Lion look like Mac App Store codes, and you'd need an existing macOS installation in that case.
You can also purchase an OS X Lion USB installation drive[4] from Apple via Amazon.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Capitan-10-11-Mac-Instruction-Include...
[1]: http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-snow...
[2]: http://www.apple.com/shop/product/D6106Z/A/os-x-lion
[3]: http://www.apple.com/shop/product/D6377Z/A/os-x-mountain-lio...
[4]: https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Thumb-Drive-Model-A1384/dp/B006...
They used some university Macs to publishing, but did their dev work on Hackintosh to avoid spending all day in a musty computer lab. It worked quite well, barring the usual issue of Hackintosh being a bit flaky. If you had to buy a machine to publish on it would be a bit less appealing, but picking up an old Mac on Craigslist sounds worth it to develop as you like and publish 'legitimately'.
the eula, which is hardly enforceable anyway, says literally "xcode must run on Apple hardware". just that. they'd have a really hard case if you used a apple keyboard or pen drive...
but, I'm not a lawyer and the lawyers at my company didn't want to test it themselves
The risk is $400 of hardware and a $99 dev account for the possibility of making way more than that releasing your own apps and making that much on a daily basis developing apps for other people.
Risk meet Reward
Risk, meet reward
You are debating over contract privileges that aren't even enforced and have very minimal consequences even if they were