I have not read the full thread yet, so sorry if I repeat some points made by others.
I'm barely older than the OP; my family had a Mac SE until 1995, I was a Very Big Mac Guy at the time. Certainly imagined that the SE would get replaced with an LC 630 or a Power Mac 6100. Then in early 1995, my dad decided to go DOS/Windows, so... that was the end of me and the Mac until, oh, 2015, when I got a refurbished mid-2014 retina MacBook Pro. And my number of Macs has grown since then - I guess I have 2.5 modern Macs, 3ish vintage Macs. But I also have a whole bunch of Windows machines. Oh, and my mom had gone Mac in late 2013 and I convinced my dad to replace a dying Windows laptop with an M1 Mac Mini.
My general view:
1) Me wading back into the Mac pool was driven by TWO unspeakable insults from Microsoft:
a) Windows 8, which attempted to turn my high-end productivity machines into ridiculous tablets with their cynical disastrous UI, and
b) Windows 11, where they had the audacity to tell me that my i7-7700 with 64 gigs of RAM, a big NVMe SSD, etc didn't meet their "performance and reliability expectations" and was therefore unsupported (and liable to break any Patch Tuesday if I force installed it) while some piece of trash one-year newer Jxxxx Celeron with 4 gigs of RAM and 32 gigs of eMMC does.
For decades, there was an unspoken understanding with Microsoft that if you bought expensive good hardware, then when you handed your money for the next version of Windows or two, that next version of Windows would treat you nicely. (The peak of this principle was perhaps Vista - while there's a lot of Vista hate out there, I had good hardware, including a ~2005 laptop where I had wisely picked the optional graphics chip that would turn out to be compatible with Aero Glass whereas the on-chipset graphics offered on that model would not be, and Vista treated me perfectly well) Then they gradually lowered how much money they wanted for the next version of Windows (until reaching a point where they stopped taking your money at all) and came up with this insulting BS.
2) The Mac is much, much more conservative. The "System Preferences" in OS X... I don't think changed from the early 10.x releases until Ventura. In those same 20 years, how many times has Microsoft rejigged the Windows Control Panel/Settings app/etc?
I have machines with Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, High Sierra, Ventura and Sonoma at the moment. You can tell the family resemblance far, far, far more than between, say, XP and Windows 11.
There's even a family resemblance with the classic OS which is... quite remarkable. I think you could take someone who spent 30 years running System 7 on a IIsi and put them in front of Sonoma and they would be a LOT more comfortable than someone who spent 30 years on DOS/Windows 3.1 and you put them in front of Windows 11.
3) There is a unity of purpose to the Mac OS that no version of Windows past 7 had had. The Mac OS understands that it is a productivity-centric, keyboard/mouse OS. If you want touch, Apple will sell you a different device with a "different" OS. Meanwhile, Microsoft has this vampire squid attitude of trying to turn Windows into an OS for everything.
4) The Mac hardware is generally better. It wasn't true in 2006 when you could get a Dell with basically the same internals as a polycarbonate MacBook, but since then, you have seen innovations like retina displays (no reasonable Windows person would get a high-resolution screen on a Windows machine...), not to mention that Macs consistently don't cheap out on little things like wifi controllers whereas Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc love to sneak in compromised parts on their consumer machines. I would also note that I always hated trackpads (give me a Dell/Lenovo with a pointing stick any day) until I started using Apple's.
5) Mobile. Assuming you use iPhones (don't all reasonable people?), there's nice integration between Macs and iPhones, e.g. the ability to send your iMessages/SMSes from the Mac. I believe Microsoft now has some integration with Android, but I've never used Android and am too old for Android.
6) Apple is responsible for everything with the Mac, so there shouldn't be any driver/compatibility/etc type issues with the built-in parts. That being said... my M1 Max MBP was affected by that audio issue that took 6+ months to fix, so sometimes Apple isn't perfect either.
7) This does not apply much to younger techier users, but I would recommend Macs for, say, seniors, simply because of the Apple stores. You know they can get reasonable service/help/etc from the Apple stores. There's no real equivalent for Windows machines - what is the closest? Geek Squad? Those guys are clueless and greedy and I wouldn't send my worst enemy's grandmother there.
8) Back in 1995 when my dad decided to abandon the Mac, there was a clear and growing software gap between the two platforms. Lots and lots of Windows-only software. But... it's worth noting, most new "software" the past 15 years has been web-based. If Chrome is the new OS, Chrome runs just as well (maybe better) on a Mac than on a Windows machine. And similarly, most new "desktop" software nowadays is Electron. Electron is a dreadful idea that performs just as badly on Windows as it does on Mac, but almost everyone using Electron provides both a Mac and Windows version of the resulting garbage, so you can have a lousy, RAM-guzzling experience on your Apple Silicon Mac or your Intel Windows machine.
And even for non-web-based software, as Mac market share (especially Mac laptops) has grown, a lot of previously Windows-only software has made the move. e.g. my favourite SSH client for Windows for 20 years has been VanDyke's SecureCRT. While they are nowhere near as good at Mac support as the Mac loyalists (BBEdit, GraphicConverter, PCalc, the usual suspects who have adopted every new Apple thing for decades in the first week after launch), they have a feature-complete, Apple Silicon-native version for Mac, and have had it for quite a long time now.
There is still a big huge software gap for games, but not really for anything else.
9) I hate, hate, hate to say this on a Mac forum, but Windows (the NT-based versions, that is, especially 7 and later) is more stable in my experience. On good hardware with good drivers with tons of RAM and automatic updates disabled, you can run Windows for months and months and it will just keep going. I have generally found that OS X occasionally requires reboots... and even occasionally gets into situations where you can't seem to nicely reboot it and have to hit Cmd-Control-Power. There was a bug (now fixed I believe) where it would stop processing touchpad clicks in certain circumstances too, which is... real fun (try nicely rebooting a system with no ability to click the mouse - if you had a terminal window you can Cmd-Tab to and do a shutdown -r now in, you're fine, otherwise... ouch). Maybe third party software (e.g. Sophos) is to blame, but that's just my experience.
