Great write up. I would have wanted to say much the same, when I cut from NetBSD to FreeBSD back when the IBM X30 laptop was my daily drive.
I ran pkg on OSX for a while, and would still do if homebrew hadn't solved other problems for me. the /opt vs /usr/local thing is quite interesting, on systems which think "they" own /usr/local
Doing things in kernel vs doing things in userspace is a subject worthy of more discussion. We now have TCP in userspace models, browsers which have internalised a huge amount of the network dependency stack and QUIC, which I do not believe is kernel supported normally.
I ran pkg on OSX for a while, and would still do if homebrew hadn't solved other problems for me. the /opt vs /usr/local thing is quite interesting, on systems which think "they" own /usr/local
Doing things in kernel vs doing things in userspace is a subject worthy of more discussion. We now have TCP in userspace models, browsers which have internalised a huge amount of the network dependency stack and QUIC, which I do not believe is kernel supported normally.