I mean I feel like my experience is completely contradictory to yours, and while I can't necessarily understand why, if I was having the experiences you were having I would also be frustrated.

I use docker daily in development - I have little to no issue with it, it's basically transparent and I have zero complaints about its performance or behavior. Perhaps I'm not doing things as complex or unique as you are? I don't really know. I have had no problems with Docker whatsoever, bar the initial migration onto the M-series chips that was clunky and awkward for several months (I was pretty much exclusively on linux, personally, until deep in this process.) Since then it's been A-OK for me. Homebrew, similarly, has just been transparent for me - I had a clunky initial 12-months-or-so and at this point I simply don't notice that I'm on a different architecture any longer. I had a lot of complaints early in the migration to apple silicon, at this point problems at least for my use case are solved.

As for the system-level APIs, yeah - I can't speak to that. I do web development primarily professionally, and then I spend a substantial amount less time mucking around locally, mostly on stuff that runs in the terminal or as a service. I do not have experience with (nor do I use) OpenGL or other whatever other basic APIs that you're referring to - I haven't really had an issue with that (other than Apple's extremely half-hearted migration into SwiftUI which feels hacky and half-finished.)

I absolutely agree that every time I type git for the first time I'm startled by remembering that I have to download the command line dev utils to get rolling with that, I wouldn't necessarily say that I agree this is indicative of a larger problem? The machine doesn't ship with git by default but you absolutely can install git outside the command line utils path if you want to (to the best of my understanding,) that's just the default behavior to unblock you in the event you just want to Get It Done.

My personal experience right now really doesn't reflect yours, and transparently I'm not sure why. I've never felt like apple's pushed any of its specific services on me aggressively, but I've also not used a machine where I didn't have some small subscription to iCloud on my account (I use it for some backups, moving stuff between my phone and laptops) and so it's entirely possible I've just never seen that portion of the experience - I may just be blind there. I just genuinely haven't felt that railroaded by the OS. I've never been using chrome and had a popup at the OS level ask me if I want to try safari, for example. I've never opened my laptop and found that suddenly there's some weird LLM-powered assistant on my taskbar that I cannot remove without a registry change. I've never installed a system update and been taken through an onboarding flow that tried to upsell me into an iWork (or whatever it's called these days) subscription and buying more space in iCloud. The stuff I really rely on (like spotlight) consistently works, and works well. I just don't find the experience as miserable as you're describing. Maybe I just am a person who is perfectly comfortable with apple's defaults and that is my blind spot, not sure.