A history of breaking dev environments? I'd argue they have a history of breaking everything on release. I do agree that they have a history of stablizing after a few months, but it's been longer than that.
Yea, Apple doesn't care about backwards comparability. You can run some ancient 32-bit Windows games on Win 10 (so long as they don't use DRM that uses low-level things like direct CD/DVD I/O). If you have a collection of physical disc Mac games, there is a good chance 0% of them run on 10.15 (or many of the releases leading up to it).
There is a good chance that less than 10% of your mac games from a few years ago work on current macos since they killed 32bit support. And now there will be essentially no new mac games since they will not support vulkan and stopped updating openGL.
The bit about a Vulkan and OpenGL isn't really accurate.
Practically no one, apart from some hobbyists working on side projects, are actually using Vulkan or Metal or D3D12 directly to make games or applications. These APIs weren't written for end-developers to use directly, they were written for engine developers.
I mean, it's fun to try. But you'll have to write something like ~1200 lines of C/C++ just to render a single triangle. It's a far cry from playing around with OpenGL immediate mode.
And to be frank, Vulkan/Metal/D3D12 are about as similar to one another as major graphics APIs have ever been. Sure, there's quite a lot of differences, but the broad strokes are more or less similar.
I agree that usually one uses a higher level API, but I've worked on commercial apps that use Metal both for graphics and compute. The code is not so unweildy as is suggested here. An old triangle test app I have here shows only about 100 lines of graphics code.
Of course, a lot of this code is code you only write once and then abstract on top of. Metal just has a lot of that abstraction "done for you" because it's only designed to work on a closed set of hardware profiles.
Vulkan requires a lot more signatures in triplicate and setup rituals. Not a bad thing, just a different target.
There are plenty of new Mac games, since all game engines that matter already added Metal support and I bet that long term Apple Arcade will have more games than Desktop Linux.
So far Vulkan has been mostly a thing on Linux anyway.
we are getting close to 10 years since I owned a Mac with an optical drive (and definitely a decade+ since I used an optical drive on my mac very often)