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I believe it was because Bash 4 switched to GPL3, which Apple did not want to follow. See https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/4/18651872/apple-macos-catal...

The article mentions it is because Bash went to GPLv3 and Zsh is MIT, and Apple is (my words) allergic to GPLv3. They avoid it everywhere. (Which tells me its a fantastic license.)

> Why is zsh forced on users anyway? Are there known issues with bash?

ZSH isn't GPL which may be important in the smaller non-Linux part of UNIX-like world. I would very much like to see ZSH in FreeBSD's base system already.

BTW, forced how?

There was a MacOS update that set everyone’s shell to zsh instead of the default (ancient) bash.

Hardly insurmountable, but the change was a “forced” part of the upgrade.

Changing users' default shell is not the same as forcing it on users. You can chpass(1) and set a different shell.

I'm not too comfortable playing devil's advocate here as Apple really does force shitty changes on users. But this isn't one of those cases.