Cool project and kudos to the developers, however projects such as these often fall into an uncanny valley for me.
The overall look matches that of MacOS (or Windows, etc), but the details are off. Fonts are wrong, padding and spacing are wrong, UI controls are a little off. The attention to detail just never matches that of the real thing.
I agree. I'd like to see some themes that are Mac-inspired but are not clones, which seem to suffer from this "uncanny valley" you mentioned.
To add, Mac OS is much more than its visual elements; the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines establishes what it means for a Mac application to be one by specifying rules that not only apply to visuals, but also to behaviors. Historically Mac users rejected software that did not comply with the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (for example, the widespread rejection of Microsoft Word 6 for Mac, which was decried as too Windows-like, which caused people to stick to the well-received Word 5.1). It's possible to make an application built using Win32, GTK, or Qt to look like a Mac application simply by applying themes with a high degree of fidelity to the Mac. However, themes are unable to change the behavior of the applications to bring them in line with the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. A typical GNOME application with a Mac theme is still a GNOME application.
Of course, in an era where cross-platform apps are increasingly becoming the norm, there's less concern about adhering to a platform's UI/UX guidelines. I still believe there is value with having an ecosystem of applications that largely comply with well-thought UI/UX guidelines, which is one area where the Mac has absolutely shined throughout its history.
The details always being a bit off makes me think the better route might be to create an environment that follows macOS in the broad strokes (e.g. global menubar, applications presiding over windows in navigation, a general inclination towards loose organization of odd sized windows, etc) but when it comes to aesthetics has its own identity filling in the details.
A lot of DEs already do similar for Windows, being variants on the Win9X desktop paradigm (taskbar, windows over applications, inclination towards windows being maximized) so it’s hardly a novel concept and I think it more consistently delivers decent results.
Projects like this miss the point. Don't bother with being what will be an always imperfect macOS clone; just bother with making a good, usable system, adopting things from macOS which are good (universal menu bar) and rejecting those that are bad (window close button next to the minimize and zoom buttons (MacOS 9 and before did things correctly with having them on different sides of the window)), not just adopting its affects wholesale. And stuff like using the (pirated?) AppleScript icon for a .sh file is just wrong…
And I'm pretty sure anyone interested in running FreeBSD is going to prefer the dark mode of macOS anyway…
The overall look matches that of MacOS (or Windows, etc), but the details are off. Fonts are wrong, padding and spacing are wrong, UI controls are a little off. The attention to detail just never matches that of the real thing.