I need to use a MacBook as my work machine (for a little over three years now), and generally have a strong dislike of the platform. It's just similar enough to Linux to lull me into believing that I kinda know what I'm doing, but just different enough to make me feel incompetent whenever I try to actually do anything nontrivial.

    System Preferences -> General -> Show scroll bars to Always.
I stumbled across this little gem about a year ago, and has been one of the bigger quality-of-life improvements I've found on this machine.

The other being

    System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys
and map Caps Lock to Escape

Or Control, depending on which you're used to. Every time I try to use Windows I'm surprised that there's no easy-to-access setting for remapping Caps Lock like there is on every Linux DE and macOS.

you can easily remap keys with PowerToys...

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys