I guess I'd argue that "it depends on lot on what you mean by development".

For anyone hosting a product on servers (almost everything web related)... there IS something special about linux: It's where your product is going to run in production.

For folks who are doing work in other spaces, especially development that involves vendor provided physical devices: Then yes, I agree with you. Vendor support is almost always better for Windows, and sometimes entirely non-existent otherwise. I'll note this is starting to change, but it's not yet over the hump.

The only place I'd consider macOS as a "perfectly fine" linux alternative is mobile (and mainly because Apple forces it with borderline abusive policy/terms). Otherwise it's just a shittier version of linux on nice hardware, riddled with incompatible tooling, forced emulation problems, and a host of other issues. It's not really even "prettier" anymore.

> For anyone hosting a product on servers (almost everything web related)... there IS something special about linux: It's where your product is going to run in production.

I've been at several corporations and companies where the target OS doesn't matter in the least, and I've had multiple projects on my own where it was the same.

Most of development is so far removed from actual hardware and actual OS, it doesn't matter if your backend is developed on Mac and runs on Linux.