Kate on MacOS is terrible. I've tried helping them fix the shortcuts which are all "wrong" (MacOS uses certain shortcuts that are unlike most Unix systems, but Kate doesn't actually use the right ones all Mac users expect so it's a nightmare until you manually override at least some of the shortcuts yourself). I tried using the build tool (suggested in the article) but building Kate was a nightmare even with that... I had to give up after a few days trying random things as suggested by people on the Kate chat (each build was taking hours, then finally failing with some completely inscrutable error).

Even though I really enjoyed using Kate on Linux, as a mainly Mac user I had to forget about it and keep using emacs for random stuff, and IntelliJ for Java/Kotlin/Groovy/Dart and anything else well supported by Jetbrains.