TL;DR : hackintoshes are a total shit-show in all but the simplest of use cases (no need for decent hardware support or any software upgrades ever)

> while nvidia just works.

Huh ?
He specifically mentions why he didn't go NVidia : NVidia doesn't "just work" on a hackintosh.
It requires installing a new closed source NVidia "web driver" for EVERY new macOS point release, because it absolutely refuses to start if there's the slightest build number mismatch, and NVidia can take days to catch up. One day, they may just get tired of it and stop supporting older cards or macOS versions.

Also, that driver refuses to install before you've actually upgraded macOS, which means your first reboot will be in super low res non-accelerated compatibility mode, and you'll have to painfully navigate to the installer in this environment then reboot a second time.

>Item three: he hasn't hand built a PC in 20 years. And since he's doing video work, he's probably not very technical either. If you're familiar with messing with a unix-like operating system at a lower level, it's fairly easy to fix all those little problems.

No it isn't, at all. I'm a systems engineer, lived and breathed Linux since 1996, including 8 years as my primary desktop OS (Slackware, Gentoo, custom kernel builds, you name it) before switching to the Mac.

I made the mistake of building a Hackintosh last year to save on an iMac's cost, and I want those dozens of hours (and counting) of my life back. The argument the author makes under "price" is spot on : if you're not a student with way more time than money, it's just not worth it. If you bill by the hour/day, don't even THINK about it.

I've now got a 80% working setup after carefully choosing compatible components (including a Z97 Asus mobo, an insanely fiddly to get working Thunderbolt card, and a custom PCI card with original Apple chips for BT/Wifi). But I've given up on getting all USB ports working, or iMessages/Facetime, or sleep/wake which is sure to freeze the machine (it also sometimes reboots out of the blue). The PC also doesn't wake my monitor up half of the time when first booting macOS, and I have to hard reset it.

Part of your journey is to "inject" kexts, pass kernel parameters with magic constants, sometimes provide binary patching instructions for drivers in a Clover plist config file. There's no single guide that takes you through all of this. Everybody has their own different thing. Even the attempts at UI tools (Clover configurator, Multibeast) to generate those config files don't attempt to hide any of the complexity.

And don't get me started about built-in audio : first, you need to pick your kext between several variants of AppleHDA available from zip files hosted on mega.com (or random Github repos when you're lucky, with no context at all given in the READMEs, when there's a README). Then, you need to find out which of a few dozens audio I/O "layouts" is appropriate for your motherboard, and manually pass that as a kernel parameter.
The tutorials disagree between each other, there's no standard way of doing it, it feels like the worst hours of Linux on the desktop.

I'm also usually an enthusiastic early OS upgrader, but I've been holding off upgrading my machine to High Sierra for months because a quick search on tonymacx86.com shows the gigantic bag of hurts this is going to be (new kexts to inject, careful with APFS, etc)

I'll finish with a self-explanatory quote from a macOS High Sierra upgrade thread on tonymacx86.com :

Some audio codecs will require an addtional patch (AppleHDA)

If you are using target codec 0x11d4198b, you may need to also zero out codec compare 0x11d4198a (a new supported codec in 10.12).

eg. in KextsToPatch:
Comment: 0x11d4198a to zero
MatchOS: 10.12.x
Name: AppleHDA
Find: <8a19d411>
Replace: <00000000>

And a helpful recommendation for an easy and "foolproof" way to upgrade to High Sierra (tl;dr : make a second OS installation from scratch on a spare disk (you have that right?), "fix it until it's bootable", then attempt a High Sierra upgrade on the first installation, compare and contrast the two and cross your fingers) : https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/it-is-unclear-how-to-upgr...