Personally I dump on both Windows and macOS for being UI and UX dumpster-fires today, compared to how they used to be. macOS in particular used to have really good UX, but as times goes on, Apple seems to ignore the actual design of software more and more, for reasons that elude me.

And I do know that all the other alternatives suck too, I'm using Gnome daily and it isn't perfect by any metric either, but it's always been like that, it's not getting better nor worse, while Windows and macOS used to be a lot better, and is getting worse. I guess that's why people are reacting stronger to it.

I disagree. macOS and gnome are really good. Even xfce is better than kde