For others it was just about the money. If you needed to run Mac software e.g. Xcode but didn't want to have to buy a Mac for that reason alone it was much cheaper to do a bit of tinkering to get OSX working on the hardware they already had.
When I first build my Hackintosh it took less effort than installing Linux on some of the other computers I had.
I built two Hackintoshes in those years, and they were rock solid. You did have to pay attention to the hardware you were buying (mostly motherboard and GPU), but if you got that right, they worked really well.
Maybe it helps that in my part of the globe Apple was largely irrelevant until they manage to survive bankruptcy with the iPod, and iMacs.
I got my current job thanks to having one. I probably wouldn't have a tech career without hackintoshes being a thing.
So in such case I would have opted out for a cheap PC built of parts running some Linux distro, or Windows, which has most audio and design tooling as OS X has.