Before Yosemite the green button worked like a maximize button, and you had a separate fullscreen button on the other side. Now you need to ⌥-click the green button to maximize.
No, that's not what it does on macOS. It simply makes the window larger and has done that ever since it was introduced, I believe. (I think for many document-based apps this just means to make the window taller, for example.)
IIRC the green button was "zoom", meaning it should adapt the window size to the window content, which in most of the cases resulted with maximizing.