If your script starts with #!/bin/bash, both bash and zsh will run it fine. The bigger problem is the programs, filesystem and libraries being different. Which is why POSIX exists, if you’re looking to write stuff that works across systems.

I couldn’t tell if you were honestly asking for explanations or if all of your complaints sum up to “it’s different and I don’t like that”. Which honestly, fair.

Like, why is bash ancient? (3.2 vs 5)

To avoid GPLv3, zsh is the new default.

Why is there no package manager

Mac App store is the official one, can also install brew, macports, pkgsrc, or nix. Or use language/runtime specific ones like npm, pip, cargo, go.

Why are the utils like ls and friends flag-order-sensitive

They avoid GNU versions of utilities, for similar licencing fears as avoiding modern bash. That said ls . -lah is unhinged, I don’t know any other unix derived ls that supports that.

Why do I have 40 network devices with cryptic names?

Yeah they got some weirdo Apple stuff

This from the company that started the netbook trend with the $400 eeePC in 2007…

In my head I thought one could make relatively cheap high capacity in 2.5" SATA form factor by having more NAND chips of lower capacity. You give up speed and PCB space but that’s fine since bandwidth and IOPS are limited by SATA anyway and there’s plenty of space compared to M.2.

Turns out to not shake out that way, controller ICs that support SATA aren’t coming out any more, and NAND ICs are internally stacked to use up channels while not taking up PCB space.

There are some enterprise options, but they’re mad expensive.

I have 4x 6TB HDDs in my NAS. Around 5 years ago I decided to simply replace any dead drives with 6TB ones instead of my previous strategy of slowly upgrading their size. I figured I could swap to 8TB 2.5" SATA SSDs that had just started to exist and would surely only get cheaper in the future…