Sure, but Linux doesn’t champion good package management. You either resort to the package system of the distro you installed, or slowly switch to flatpak/snap, and then likely the package manager of the language you are developing in. It’s no different to using brew on macOS.

I would argue basing your entire OS on the package managers makes dev add more friction, not less. Perhaps the only Linux example trying to escape that is nixos, which is nice when you get the hang of it, but it’s a little restrictive. For straight Linux development of course Linux will be the best choice. For straight macOS development of course macOS will be the best choice. For straight windows development of course windows will be the best choice. Distributing docker containers is mostly OS agnostic now, and though you mentioned it, the performance payoff for virtualization on apple M hardware is minuscule.

Most IT departments at big software companies will opt for macOS for their software devs nowadays, unless they explicitly request Linux. That’s not exclusive, bigger tech companies will let you choose because they have the bandwidth to support multiple OS’s, but they do that because supporting one *nix based OS is much easier than supporting every Linux based distro, with a different package system.

I’ve used arch. The community repo is amazing, but flawed in its own way. I’ve used Ubuntu, figuring out the PPA system sucks. I’ve used Fedora/Redhat, trying to get deb packages to work when they aren’t in the rpm library is a ride. I’ve used SUSE, Yast is great, and again become frustrating when the package you need isn’t there.

There are far more variables working with Linux distros, and usually those variables, when you’re just trying to write code, make things more difficult, not easier

At the end of the day it sounds like we’re tackling very different versions of the dev world anyway. You are trying to emulate Linux servers on apple hardware. I’m writing native apps for iOS and Android that use web views to render our components. Of course macOS wouldn’t be the best for Linux container infrastructure work, but that’s a small subset of the dev work that exists, just as my work is a small subset, however I’d still argue that on a larger scale, macOS is a better dev OS.