I can criticise Mac OS endlessly and was even actively downvoted here when reported facts of my personal experience with bugs on newly purchased M1 (you can dig the history if you wish). I was shocked how quality degraded in my opinion.
People here were even claiming that it’s my specific faulty machine was to blame. This ‘faulty’ machine by the way works to this very day without any hardware problems except flickering of the monitor which is idiotic in my opinion design decision (to use PWM).
So as you can see I am very critical of macOS and consider using Windows after macOS like completely unbearable. And yet your comment have puzzled me.
When I was learning macOS after years with Windows I remember that certain things were like you say “impossible to discover”. Yet with all that being said I find other GUI implementations in GNU/Linux not any better.
Perhaps I’ve missed something in KDE? What did I miss? What “doing anything beyond basic” means in your usage? What kind of tasks/workflows are those ? How KDE better in those?