I used it successfully on my Mac last week. It's still GIMP (bleh!) but it works.
You can consider Affinity Photo
Same suggestion, purchased during the last Christmas sales period. PS’s price is out of my reach as a non-professional user.
All of the Affinity products are top notch. I wanted a simple vector tool and ended up liking Affinity Designer so much I picked up a course to learn it more in-depth. The best part is their pricing model doesn't suck, so I'm happy to pay for their wares.
Which course did you take?
It was an iPad specific course on Udemy [0] a couple years ago. Looks like it hasn't been updated in a while, but it was great for what I was after.
In November 2020, Gimp 2.10.14 didn't work well or at all on Big Sur. The issues got workarounds and bugfixes, but there are still complaints about performance. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/5917