I'll be the devil's advocate even though I agree with you partially and I personally prefer Linux, both for practical and philosophical reasons. However, I use a Linux laptop privately and macOS for work, so I think by now I understand both systems a little bit.
For automating tasks on macOS you can look at something like hammerspoon which is really cool (though I mostly use it to modify some of the macOS keybindings which I find ridiculous) [1].
Finder is crap, I agree. But then again, I'm mostly in the terminal, so I don't care much. I would however complain that the default terminal on macOS is really not very good and I always install iTerm2... most Linux distros seem to have a better terminal pre-installed.
Package manager is better on Linux for system packages, applications, etc. (in fact, such a thing doesn't really exist on macOS, save for maybe homebrew cask, but that has problems). However, dev packages are tricky on Linux, too. Generally, for dev packages I might want to have a) a very specific (and often the latest) version of something, and b) often multiple versions installed separately. Additionally, on most Linux distros you can't install without root. On a Linux machine, I mostly have to install such tools in addition to my package managed libraries and apps, on macOS I can typically just "brew install rbenv" or so (though homebrew has its own share of problems).
In general I would say that macOS makes it slightly easier to do things sort-of reasonably well for default flows but can break down quickly once you want something more custom. With Linux, while it has become a lot (!) better in the last 15 years or so, I still occasionally need to debug some audio problem or so. The upside is that problems on Linux are generally solvable (although, in some instances it can be hard to figure out exactly how). If your macOS does something that is weird or buggy (e.g.: before the update to big sur I had the annoying issue that my system would go into DND mode after every restart, which is really not good if you don't want to miss notifications), then you're out of luck and there's nothing you can do.
> most Linux distros seem to have a better terminal pre-installed.
I haven't found a Linux terminal that is as good as iTerm, in terms of features. Any recommendations?
This might be the best recent overview of some of the pros and cons between some of the different options: https://anarc.at/blog/2018-04-12-terminal-emulators-1/