Exactly this. There was a point in the late 2000's / early 2010's where Mac's were very overpriced relative to the hardware they were selling.

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.

Usually the way is to favour the competition instead, all those arguments are known to me.

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.

Getting to play around with new GPUs was one of the things that kept me excited.