I build Guile on the Mac regularly. I need to pass the paths to these 4 libraries to configure: libgmp, libunistring, libiconv, and libreadline. The libraries themselves I get from MacPorts. Then make check && make install. Doesn't look all that awful to me to be honest.
Doing it using libraries installed by homebrew is borderline impossible unless you write your own brew formula. I have up on trying to use deps from homebrew and went with macports, and voilà: worked flawlessly.
It is not unique to guile either. Compiling things on Mac os brings back memories from Redhat 8. I have had so much more luck with WSL or even cygwin than Mac os for at least a dozen open source apps.
