Macs used to be so easy to use on Classic Mac OS. Mac OS X really left a lot of people behind on the usability front. It became much more of a power user OS. Then iPads came along and stole that group (of ordinary users) away.
But now it seems they’re adding more and more power user features to iOS, complicating things again (with even less discoverability due to complex gestures). History seems to be repeating itself.
I gather classic Mac OS was done so you can get on with whatever you're doing and nothing bothered you.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/turn-a-focus-on-or-...
Applications stealing focus is a plague though. Maybe Apple will finally figure out that it's not worth having in their API.
Both Apple and Microsoft have regressed in this respect. Minimalism and prettiness have taken priority over usability in both modern macOS and modern Windows and they are far more inconsistent and harder to learn to use as a result. Often something that you learn in one place place or app now doesn't work in another.
In Apple's case this has been mostly as a result of their efforts to make macOS and iOS more alike and to share applications/components across the two, which often creates weird-feeling results and awkward app designs. In Microsoft's case this is mostly because they have more UI frameworks than sense and each new one introduces more problems than solutions. Electron-adjacent apps probably don't help matters either, since they also generally break all of the platform rules and implement their own UI controls anyway.
[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/573097 [2] https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro...