The same reason console wars exist. If there are multiple choices, and it's not practical to take/use/buy all the options, people feel the need to justify the choice that they did make. When someone's starting from a defensive position, unemotional rationality is uncommon.
it's really not the same as console wars. You touch and interact with a laptop far more often than a video game console. That alone makes the comparison invalid.
While i am no apple fanatic, i will readily admit that much of their hardware is designed extremely well from an ergonomic standpoint. Barring obvious failures like their push to make things needlessly thin, a lot of their hardware is durable and holds its value well. Personally, i have a macbook from 2014 that i still use daily for basic tasks and its keyboard is very well built.
While some user behaviour is fanatical, one cannot deny that apply invest a lot into usability of their hardware and software and it shows. Can't say the same for a lot of windows laptops.
Tangentially, I'm not certain it even exists outside of sociopaths. A certain amount of emotion or beliefs underlies most rational arguments.
The problem is when emotional rationality devolves to either shallowness (i.e. fleeting trends) or fanaticism ("there is only one true option forever").
But shallowness and fanaticism are always present because they are both easier routes to self appeasement in a world that usually pushes people towards lower self concept.
As a developer/gamer I use all these systems and with every year I'm less and less motivated to use macOS. Linux is clear winner for everything I need server related and Windows is fine for everything client related. macOS is in this weird spot where it lacks most of the server side stuff (lack of hosting, poor virtualization support etc.), but it also lacks some of the client side things (poor gaming, no hardware customization etc.).
Yeah I am kind of in this boat as well - Windows is held back by some legacy stuff but has also gotten better and better. It also has a bunch more spyware crap (but if you know what to do thankfully you can disable most of that). It used to be back in the day you had to choose between a smooth OSX experience or a bloated adware filled windows XP.
Linux has also gotten dramatically easier as well of course and is free. I still like MacOS generally but I always thought it was a mistake to completely ignore server-adjacent stuff that powerusers would want. If I buy a Mac and own MacOS why can't I also run a MacOS VM on that same machine? Would be pretty cool to have 3 or 4 running simultaneously with these new processors.
Last I checked, and it's been a couple years, the MacOS license allows you to run up to three MacOS images on your MacOS hardware. We do that on our MacOS build servers we use for building iOS apps since you can't have multiple versions of Xcode installed simultaneously.
The same reason console wars exist. If there are multiple choices, and it's not practical to take/use/buy all the options, people feel the need to justify the choice that they did make. When someone's starting from a defensive position, unemotional rationality is uncommon.
AKA, it's human nature.