I find myself preferring macports for a lot of things, but homebrew has brought its own niceness to the table.
It's just a bit of a nightmare as a software author because so much rework is done to repackage your stuff in n formats: one for nix, one for guix, one for debian, one for redhat, one for homebrew, one for macports, snap, flatpak, AUR, cross-compilation for alpine, maybe add a PPA in there for the ubuntu fans...and then some of them try to wrap packages on npm, rubygems, pypi, etc.
it's all done by the community but at the same time, so many of the people you want to help with your software won't touch it if their only option is to clone the repo and compile it (which in itself is simple, if done thoughtfully)
It's just a bit of a nightmare as a software author because so much rework is done to repackage your stuff in n formats: one for nix, one for guix, one for debian, one for redhat, one for homebrew, one for macports, snap, flatpak, AUR, cross-compilation for alpine, maybe add a PPA in there for the ubuntu fans...and then some of them try to wrap packages on npm, rubygems, pypi, etc.
it's all done by the community but at the same time, so many of the people you want to help with your software won't touch it if their only option is to clone the repo and compile it (which in itself is simple, if done thoughtfully)