- Trivial to set up, and run. - Super low power consumption. - No noise. - Dirt cheap.
I wish you had listed at least one or a few technical reasons why that is the case. It's assertions like these which uninformed people then go around parroting in unrelated contexts, in the hopes of gaining HN points because someone with 18k odd HN points made this statement, so surely it must be true. This is how all the "experts have said ..." information gets born.
The port of pf has a synfilter, but that doesn't work for traffic to the host, it might work for forwarded traffic, but not for the host itself.
I thought Apple rebased at some point but maybe that was when NeXT merged with Apple.