Building a new Linux box is easy, too. If you can pick and choose amongst compatible hardware, there's no messing around at all to get a performant and updateable system.
I can see how someone in a particular field, such as video editing, might prefer certain macOS apps. For general software development, though, a Linux machine feels like a much safer bet.
>has to mess around more with Hackintosh than with a Linux installation
As someone who lived with an Ubuntu installation for 5 years up until 10.10 and then with Arch for arount 4 years - you statement about linux being an easy thing to handle is correct as long as you are fine with a distro like ubuntu and don't want to change much.
As soon as you embrace something more hacky or at least more bleeding edge - you are in the world full of unexpected surprises. Any major update can cause you hours of problems because distro devs decided to switch from somethingX to somethingY and you had to prepare your installation before updating but alas, you rarely read the fron page of https://www.archlinux.org and now you have to rollback and do everything right.
Not a too common scenario but not an uncommon one too.
Not to metion that for the most part linux remains a second-class citizen to software devs, so you won't see much of a general purpose software of the same quality macOS has to offer. Which is a problem if you are going to use the machine for something other then software development.
I can see how someone in a particular field, such as video editing, might prefer certain macOS apps. For general software development, though, a Linux machine feels like a much safer bet.