It's not universal but some of this stuff seemingly stems from the framework level -- Gtk and Qt.

For example, QGIS and FreeCAD are very good indeed on the Mac, and the quirky problems FreeCAD has on the Mac are generally Qt problems (font mapping, some window handling stuff, very occasional high-DPI things).

Command-line/server-based FOSS stuff is usually not a great challenge.

I guess this is kind of what one could predict, comparing Linux and the Mac. Though it's also the case that Qt and Gtk get more portability eyeballs on Windows, which again is probably what one could predict.

+1. It's frustrating me right now, because newer members onboarding to our team are having all kinds of issues with Element amongst other software.

Yeah, happened to GIMP as well, for a while they didn't have anyone in charge of macOS builds, so they just skipped the platform for a few releases.

I suspect that not only relieved some of their own stress, but also sent a very clear message to the community that someone needed to take up that slack if they wanted OSX builds.