That is indeed an incredibly frustrating difference, because there is no version of it that works on both GNU and macOS. In practice I often end up using perl to do an in-place search-replace instead.
There's far less variance between Perls on different systems than there are for sed/awk/shell. So if you want performant portable code, Perl does better than all of those.
I'd never use Perl for a 'big' program these days but it still beats the crap out of the mess of sed/awk/bash/ksh/zsh.
I don't even have it on my Linux system any more; for better or worse, fewer and fewer things use it.
If you make GNU coreutils the first binaries in PATH, you can expect subtle, _very nasty_ issues.
The last one I encountered was `hostname` taking something like 5 seconds to run. Before that, there was some bug with GNU’s stty which I don’t remember the specifics of.
echo foo | sed -i pattern
echo foo | sed -i .orig