> looked as close as possible to native apps

This is a meaningless statement, because even native apps don't "look like" native apps. No operating system has a universal style across all native apps, and some (Windows) aren't even internally consistent with the OS's apps.

> no operating system has a universal style across all native apps

Imo, an app that isn’t using Cocoa (or carbon for older apps) widgets on macOS isn’t “native”. If you just use the default widget set on macOS, your app will have a consistent style with every other native app. If you use Qt, Swing, Electron, etc., your app will look out of place and break in ways that annoy at least some of your users.

there's more than twenty years of examples of macOS apps using Cocoa and Carbon and being inconsistent with the rest of the OS, iTunes being the most egregious

So that's an excuse to make things even more inconsistent?

I get your point, though; I'm a Linux desktop user, and have to contend with apps written using a variety of UI framework. For that reason, I tend to try to stick with GTK apps, as I prefer consistency. I have Qt set up to use/emulate GTK's theming as close as possible. No, it's not perfect, but most things on my desktop look pretty consistent.

Except webapps, of course! They break everything when it comes to consistency. I wish that wasn't the case.

Safari, Edge and Chrome don't style any HTML elements like their native counter parts.

Which is part of what is being criticized. Say about Internet Explorer what you will, but it used native controls.