Homebrew is very bad, probably one of the worst package managers I've used, and light years worse than Arch Linux pacman or apt, which I'm not a fan of, but better than Brew.
It's certainly one of the better macOS package managers, just because it's the most used — so it has more packages than the competition.
It can be hard to say what's best altogether, since paradigm (rather than individually differentiating virtues) might dominate a user's preference or need.
There's a set of common problems that all package management systems eventually have an opportunity to address, and each tradition is committed to a few fundamental tradeoffs in its solution to those common problems. Additionally, there are problems specific to each paradigm, and solutions within a given tradition address those with varying degrees of success. Package managers generally inherit the virtues and defects of their traditions when it comes to how they solve the common problems, but they can excel individually in terms of how well they resolve the problems specific to their paradigm.
Incidentally, Homebrew is a ‘traditional’ source-based package manager, but it's also been developed more or less naively (i.e., without serious examination of any other package managers in any tradition). So it has most of the annoyances that are common to traditional source-based package managers, and it additionally bungles a lot of the fundamentals compared to competitors in its class.
As for what's good: how detailed of an answer do you want?
Not the one you're asking but I use snap, flatpak, apt, nix, and guix all on one laptop and nix and guix are far and away the finest, minus the invisible autoupdates of snap, a feature which tons of people hate but I love.
Any package manager that manages mutable and non-deterministic packages should be doused in gasoline and set aflame.
I've only spent a lot of time with homebrew, apt, yum, dnf, pacman, and the latter is miles ahead in speed, efficiency, with the only drawback behind non-sensical option mnemonics: so instead of `pacman update all`, you get used to doing `pacman -Syu`
Then add Arch Linux's AUR, and you get the best ecosystem in the Linux world bar none.
It takes very little effort to setup them up, you can install via Windows Store, and start the VMs like any Windows program. What's not approachable?
> the terminal (the new and old) are pretty limiting
Windows Terminal is a big leap forward, but it still feels clunky compared to terminals in OSX/Gnome/KDE. It's little things, like copy/paste or even highlighting text - the lack of a right-click context menu is frustrating. But it's still a welcome effort, and native ssh support means I can rely on putty a little less.
> ...anything competes with Mac OSX terminal out of the box...
Would you like to explain how? Maybe not iTerm2, but the Windows Terminal is a pretty capable terminal compared to Terminal.app and it's development progress has been phenomenal.
> WSL1 and 2 aren't super approachable even now...
How so? WSL2 ships with a full Linux kernel, the GUI/Audio support has already hit Insiders and installing Ubuntu is literally two clicks on the MS Store.
You're kidding, right? It's less than 5 minutes of setup. We spend more time on Google/StackOverflow trying to find the right setting for Docker or other random things.
It's certainly one of the better macOS package managers, just because it's the most used — so it has more packages than the competition.