Here's my guess. Homebrew had at least these things going for it: - it has always had a strong emphasis on presenting a simple, clean, pleasant, pretty, pla

Here's my guess. Homebrew had at least these things going for it: - it has always had a strong emphasis on presenting a simple, clean, pleasant, pretty, playful UI and executed that well - when it came out, source-based package managers for macOS generally didn't have any binary caching mechanisms, so compile time mattered - Homebrew's embrace of the base system as opposed to bringing its own dependencies bought it greater reuse at the cost of robustness, driving down total time to install many packages - the language that `brew` and its packages were written in was trendy at thw time as well as pre-installed on macOS, which made them instantly accessible to huge numbers of web developers - the older macOS package managers generally drew on traditions and tooling from the Linux world (e.g., Fink, with Debian tooling) or the wider Unix world (e.g., MacPorts and various *BSD ports systems and packages written in some Tcl IIRC). The type of person with the experience that would lead them to prefer tools and conventions like one sees in Fink, MacPorts, and Pkgsrc, or to contribute to those projects, has likely always been dismayed, if not repulsed, by a number of Homebrewisms. I think we can therefore conclude that Homebrew didn't win the package availability race by converting MacPorts contributors— Homebrew succeeded in attracting a largely untapped pool of new contributors. Eventually there followed the majority of non-contributor users who just want to use whatever already offers the software they want to run.