It is being discussed because we’re in the middle of the transition from X to Wayland. Before there wasn’t much discussion. In a few years when it settles out there probably won’t be much discussion.
Windows and Mac have never had a choice. There might have been significant changes to a window manager layer, but it would have been part of a larger version upgrade. Like between windows 3.1 and 95 or OS 9 to OS X. The visible changes would be closer to desktop environment like KDE and Gnome in Linux.
I suspect the studies with small numbers of spread out participants are missing the inflation effects.
We need a study of a whole town to see if giving everyone extra money is going to make the price of everything go up by the same amount.
I’m hopeful this is a good idea and would likely vote for it, but I worry a bit that it will be pointless in the end.