I cannot agree more. At least for myself i would add MacOS as a huge plus over any other laptop. I know many people work in Linux but I just for the life of me cannot make it as comfortable as MacOS.
Linux is good if you can configure it for a very specific purpose, like a server, or a graphics workstation, or even web development. For general purpose, its warts grow the more you use it. Hopefully someone has a dangerous looking Bash one-liner that will solve all your problems.
I now run a tiling window manager (i3wm) on a Debian distro (PureOS, came with the laptop) and I'm enjoying it immensely.
I still use an external Apple keyboard (a magic keyboard from 2015 - y'know, when they were good hehe). The trackpad has never been quite up to the Mac's standard, so I use an external mouse too. But I was using an external keyboard and mouse even on the MBP, so no change there (just the option to switch to trackpad isn't as awesome).
I then bought a Purism 13, which has been awesome (apart from a niggling problem with the space bar). Having a laptop designed from the ground up to be open, maintainable, and running Linux is an amazing experience. I had a problem with the screen on this one and tech support said "open up the back of the case and have a look to see if anything looks odd". I had more or less the exact same issue with the MBP and had to do without my laptop for a week while they replaced the screen.
It's very much like Windows and it's pretending Desktop is the root folder and then hiding everything behind databases of My Documents.
Dont make me jump through hoops to find computery stuff.
I'm curious what "computery" stuff you're looking for? If you're trying to modify stuff a "normal user" wouldn't touch, you'd be better off on the command line. Finder isn't meant for people who want to muck around with the system because everyday normal users shouldn't be messing with system files.
Personally I hardly ever use Finder. Cmd+Space to launch apps and then I use those apps to manage their document types. I develop using VSCode and I'm on iTerm I'd say 75% time anyways.
These "Macs aren't for power users" threads always kind of fascinate me, because it's so clear how differently people define "power user," and at times it feels like a lot of people define it as "this system has defaults that I don't like" or, even more often around here, "If I ever feel like I have to touch my mouse the system is crap." Whereas for me, I want a launcher/workflow runner like Alfred, which very often is my "command line" for a lot of functionality. I can assign a keyboard shortcut to anything in any menu in any application at the system level. I can wrap Unix scripts in Automator actions and put them in the Service context menu, so I can highlight text in any application and run it through a filter with a single click. I drag the proxy document icon in the title bar of windows to perform actions on that file all the time. To me, these are totally "power user" things, while I've never once thought "man, if only I had a mouse-free tiling 'window' manager that just split the screen in multiple sections with no overlapping windows I would be so much more productive."
Also, I'm typing this on a 2020 Macbook Air and it has a terrific keyboard. With the release of this 13" MacBook Pro, AFAIK this eliminates the butterfly keyswitch from their lineup.
For navigating: try ranger.
Just press cmd+shift+period in the Finder to unhide all the hidden files and directories.
You can also write `open /path/to/somewhere` from any location in your terminal window to open the Finder at that spot.