I’ve used Macs all of my adult life, my first Mac came with System 7, and then up to Mac OS 8 and beyond. I’ve used every iteration of Mac OS since.
System 7, Mac OS 8, and Mac OS 9 were in a word: FUNctional! By that I mean the ol’ Apple tagline “it just works” wasn’t just marketing. It really did just work. Never crashed, no viruses, just easy, smooth, simple functionality.
And it was FUN to use. Since things did what they were supposed to do, and the system was build from the ground up to be intuitive for anyone - from children to the elderly, there weren’t any struggles to get stuff to do what you wanted, and especially the later versions, the OS interface was highly customizable. You could modify the window skins, scroll bars, icons, schemas, everything. Want to make your Mac look like a tropical fish aquarium, with all the windows swimming sound and making glub glub sounds when you opened files? Easy. Want it to be no-nonsense black & white fast as hell pro system? No problem.
Sometimes people got carried away and overdid it with the customizations, and they’d brick their computers (I was an Apple certified tech for a while and had to repair many a file system) - and that was even a fun challenge.
Ultimately, pre-OSX MacOS was a great product of its time. It was different from Windows - and that’s what threw off many Windows users - they’d try to approach MacOS as if it were a WinPC, and things weren’t where they expected them to be, but if you learned MacOS (which was easy) you’d find it did everything you needed it to do.
I don’t follow your comment that the current MacOS “being more fisher priced down in looks,” I think it looks very sleek & professional, but whatever. To each their own.