I don’t think believe that’s true. Apple has always treated the Mac differently than its other devices, even back in the iPod days and before. One can still see that today in how for instance they made M-series Macs capable of booting third party operating systems when it would’ve been much easier to not do that, with the architectural base of these machines being iPads. macOS has had some bolts tightened in the past decade, but all of that has legitimate value in security and stability and much of it is being mirrored by other desktop operating systems (e.g. immutable system, moving things out of the kernel to userspace, etc).
