Macs are about the package, not the computer or the OS alone. You get a beautiful, well built machine with an OS to match. The OS is not terribly alien and, if you are a serious developer, it has enough Unix to make you happy. Unless you look too closely (I spend most of my time with Python) it looks a lot like the servers that'll run your code.

Ubuntu is my preferred OS for work. Matching the servers my code runs on is great, even though I run my code inside VMs or containers (often with the last LTS release). As you mention, it's exquisitely automatable - I can do and redo configurations in seconds.