I haven't done much myself, but I think a lot of people working on hobby operating systems use emulators or virtual machines to make development easier. Qemu an

I haven't done much myself, but I think a lot of people working on hobby operating systems use emulators or virtual machines to make development easier. Qemu and VirtualBox are popular and both run on macOS. If you want to hack on your main operating system, then yeah, you'll probably want to switch to Linux, but I wouldn't do that yet.