I don't feel that I have to fight the operating system at all. In order to get the package manager and a modern version of coreutils you have to run three commands:

    $ sudo xcode-select --install
    $ /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
    $ brew install coreutils

The upside is getting a system where most of what I need works out of the box with fairly sensible defaults. The viability of macOS probably depends heavily on the kind of work you're doing.