Microsoft is/was far more developer friendly than Apple

MFC may have been a steaming pile of doodoo, but at least the tools for developing on the OS were generally free and had decent documentation

Pretty sure this was not true for the longest time actually. Up to at least the mid 90s, both Apple and Microsoft had their own tools like Visual Basic/C/C++ and MPW on the Mac and none of those tools were free. You could get significant educational discounts or other deals but the tools cost real money.

Later, Xcode (or Project Builder) became pretty much free with the first release of MacOS X. You could buy a Mac and install all the tools to develop software. Very much in the spirit of NeXT. I am sure something similar happened for Microsoft around the same time.

And now of course all the tools both native from vendors + a large selection of additional third party tools are basiclly free for all major platforms.

(Disregarding things like 'app store fees' or 'developer accounts' which exists for both Apple and Microsoft but are not 100% required to build stuff.)