I have no idea what you are talking about. I have been using macOS for years for nearly a decade and have used a normal folder structure with folders and subfolders just like I use now. Only that macOS allowed the additional tagging with keywords of files and folders, that made searching easier. Granted I stopped using anything more modern than macOS Catalina, because that was the last thing that was supported on my old macbook, and after tinkering with wine, homebrew and the like for a few years I got a new laptop on which I installed linux because the hoops I had to jump through to get most modern software I needed for my studies working was getting absurd; I do have a bone to pick with apple for their software support. So I am definitively not the average macOS user and do not know what they did afterwards with the OS.

But you can use both the apple office suite to export to common microsoft office files or you can install the microsoft suite or libre office or whatever else. And the apple ‘Preview’ to view and edit both images and PDFs was one of the nicest image and pdf viewers I’ve ever used. And just the usal ways of attaching a file on an email or dumping it on a usb stick worked, if you did not want to use one of the myriad cloud services. So unless apple removed all usb-slots from their hardware or nukes the device once a thumb drive is detected I really do not understand what you are talking about, facetious or not. Hate apple for their planed and enforced obsolescence of otherwise working tech, not for their noncompliance with data formats, or otherwise mostly imagined problems. Stops ranting