My memory had himem.sys as a config.sys option though, with various numbers you could pass to it. EMM386 was another one too.
It was tricky to work out what you could do - a lot of trial and error, this was in the pre-internet time (at least for the typical home user), so things tended to come from hints in magazines.
Apparently one of those tricks was reducing the amount of available memory, or something like that. That was the hack that got U6 to boot and be playable at a normal speed.
This would have been in 1998 or so, so my memories of the exact fix are pretty faint.
My general recollection from being a DOS power user (and developer) and a very sometime Mac user in that era was that Macs were less likely to be "problematic" but when something did go wrong, you had far fewer tools and observability to work around the problem.
If you knew Macsbugs, ResEdit and Codewarrior you had complete control of your software and hardware.
Or better yet, TMON[1]! What an amazing debugger. I spent many hours in there, trying to figure out why the 64K ROM was stepping all over registers that were supposed to be protected by particular ROM traps. (to be fair, there were not too many of these, and they were all eventually patched by system updates)
On the second point, generally the hardware was reliable, and Mac users had tools available to diagnose software issues. There just wasn’t any printing stuff to a console.
Well, no. The Mac alternative to DOS TSRs that loaded in High Memory would be Desk Accessories.
>Introduced in 1984 as part of the operating system for the Apple Macintosh computer, a Desk Accessory (DA) was a piece of software written as a device driver, conforming to a particular programming model. The purpose of this model was to permit very small helper-type applications to be run concurrently with any other application on the system. This provided a small degree of multitasking on a system that initially did not have any other multitasking ability.