Back in the 2010s much of the appeal of hackintoshing was getting the niceness of macOS on hardware that was much more powerful and better cooled than anything Apple sold.

They were also quite stable if one selected their hardware for it and adhered to best practices. My custom built i6700k hackintosh tower was solid and quiet and expandable.

Yes there’s also Linux but if one enjoys macOS as a desktop, there’s precious little in the Linux world for you. Most DEs are windows-like, and though GNOME and Pantheon share a few qualities with macOS the resemblance is skin deep at best.

> I never really saw the appeal of Hackintoshes.

CI and build farms

It used to be that MacOS was so slick and user friendly, and had the kind of software that Windows did not have, that it was worth botching around with to get it to work.

But that hasn't -really- held up. MacOS burned a lot of the "Creative" class that Steve Jobs used to market to early on. While there are still plenty of designers that use MacOS, the market is more fragmented now since the design tools are more Web-based and less Desktop-based. Audio tools have become more cross platform as well.