This comment makes me feel really old.

MacOs wasn't always layered on unix, and the unix-haters' handbook predates the switch to the unix-based MacOs X.

Of course not, but the switch to BSD fixed a bunch of the underpinnings in the OS and was a sane base to work off of.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but they found religion. Unlike Classic (and early versions of Windows for that matter), there was more to be gained by ceding some control to the broader community. Microsoft has gotten better (PowerShell - adapting UNIX tools to Windows, and later WSL, where they went all in)

Still, for Apple it meant they had to serve two masters for a while - old school Classic enthusiasts and UNIX nerds. Reading the back catalog of John Siracusa's (one of my personal nerd heroes) old macOS reviews gives you some sense of just how weird this transition was.

The Unix Haters Handbook was published in 1994, when System 7 was decidedly not unix-like.

You can also drop the "-like". (-:

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1489/