For window management, please consider using the Rectangle app or some other keyboard window manager. Otherwise, I believe its possible to long press on the maximize button to put your windows on the left or right half.
There's also Zoom, activated by option-clicking the green button. This resizes the window to the app's preferred size, which is random, and usually not the full screen (e.g. full screen height but whatever width it had before).
Turns out operating systems named "Windows" are much better at window management. (The maximizing stuff is one issue, the application-first model is another.)
I never minded the application-specific Zoom behavior in macOS, in fact I find it much saner than Windows where you often end up with dead space inside an Application doing nothing. Safari pretty intelligently figures out the maximum horizontal width of a page before padding would be applied and resizes to that when zooming unless your window is already beyond that breakpoint, for example. Same thing with Word, for example. I don't want to see a bunch of dead space on my screen, I just want to show the maximum amount of content my application+display can show at once. (This is where I really dislike the change to the green traffic light, I don't want Window-like behavior on a Mac)
Ohh I never knew about that. Thank you!