For the last 5 years (since Apple Silicon was released), Homebrew has installed to /opt/homebrew by default.
I don't see a lot of engineers running Intel Macs anymore. I haven't seen any engineers who still use an Intel model, myself, and for quite some time. Especially when there are Apple Silicon options for well under $1,000 that highly outperform the Intel models.
I like it in ~/.brew where I have full permission to it and only my user.
> Technically, you can just extract (or git clone) Homebrew wherever you want.
However, Homebrew maintainers are dickish about essentially banning you from contributing to the project if your installation is nonstandard. They have a similarly discouraging warning if you are running a developer beta, which has turned me off of contributing fixes to broken formulas lest they reject them.
> If you decide to use another prefix: don’t open any issues, even if you think they are unrelated to your prefix choice. They will be closed without response.