I believe apple phones home quite a bit. The good thing is that on macos, you can launch a terminal and run "ps" to see what is going on, or use "ls" to see what apps and files exist (unlike ios).

Note that back when macos first launched, if a program crashed wanted to send information to apple, you would get a popup, see what would be sent and decide whether to send it or not. Nowadays all kinds of things are just sent, like every time you create an account, even a local one or one for work, it phones home.