Mac's are just as bad as Windows, just in different ways.

They're absolutely not.

Not to mention the entirely soldered RAM and SSD

Hate to tell you this but this is the direction of the entire industry. Look at the new Ryzen "AI Max" chips. Integrating CPU/GPU/RAM on the same chip just leads to crazy increases in performance and efficiency. As usual Apple paves the path to erosion of consumer choice.

Apple has been progressively neutering root on a path to make a laptop as much of a walled garden as iOS.

I agree it's a very bad thing in general but it can also be disabled with some simple terminal commands. MS goes out of their way to constantly break any solutions consumers might find to make their systems suck less.