This is something that goes back to the dark ages too. I can remember using my dad’s SE30 and sound ‘just working’, while friends with PCs were screwing around with sound card and driver issues.
I’m not a macOS guy but I was pretty surprised how woeful the default audio experience is on macOS. Coming from Linux background it was strange you need third-party tools that require you to boot into recovery.
The built in Audio MIDI app that was a holdover from the OS 8/9 days was actually quite powerful for a long time, but when the kernel extensions got locked down some of the third party options were harder to get working smoothly (across upgrades especially).
The Audio Midi manager app on macOS is still pretty great and is more or less the backend of Rogue Amoeba's Loopback.
It's always strange to me when people call Loopback expensive, because I will pay for reliability and ease of operation. I have also had very thorough help from Rogue Amoeba for a situation that involves interconnecting Google Voice and Zoom so that I can call out with Google Voice and join the person on the call to an ongoing Zoom session and it is invisible and seemless for all.
From an outsider looking in, I'm just confused why Apple hasn't purchased Rogue Amoeba (or Sherlock'd them) considering they make keystone applications for the media application landscape on macOS (unless I'm misled from the Apple podcasts I listen to).