The early MacOS era as well as pretty much the entire classic Mac OS era was infamous for being a more-or-less do it yourself environment for adding bits the OS didn't have or did sub-optimally for given use cases.

The wisdom of such a freewheeling ecosystem in today's era is maybe debatable, but given how user-hostile the mainline OS and software vendors can be, I say there's still plenty of room for that ecosystem and it should be preserved.