I've yet to see a MCU vendor ship without bugs. At least with ST, the MCU is very cheap.
>USB controllers straight up doesn't enumerate with ARM Macs
I've seen USB devices struggling to enumerate on Mac/IOS devices before. This feels more like an Apple bug to me considering how they work very well on Linux, Windows and Android.
This one is nice too, it has an enclosure. You could use this for a smart home dashboard. Be careful with the boards with two USB ports, they will backfeed power.
I would recommend getting a ST nucleo board over raspberry PICO or ESP32. The nucleo boards have integrated SWD programmer which makes flashing easier. You can also use it to debug your code. Try to get one with onboard USB port (like https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/nucleo-f767zi.html) so that you can build USB projects.
>it finally feels like embedded is getting a toolchain that is actually modern and better
Last time i tried embassy, it pulled over 100 dependencies just to build a blinky. Its great for hobbyist programming but i doubt its going to be used in any industrial application any time soon.