It's better than on Windows but it still happens to me, especially with update alerts.

It most definitely does, such as Google Calendar event alerts at least under Chrome. I'm not sure why it doesn't have unobtrusive desktop alerts instead. I'll have to take a look later to see if that's an option.

There is an option in Google Calendar under settings -> notifications -> Use browser notifications instead of interruptive alerts

Chrome on macOS always drove me mental, because of their absolutely terrible and reimplemented notifications system. Drove me batty. Nowadays I browse in Safari and develop in Firefox and Safari, so I don't know if it still does this

They actually switched to native notifications as of about two weeks ago.

I'm still on an older version of Office and it has it's own alerts system that I can't control. Maddening.

While I mostly agree with you I recently had a corrupted keychain that I was trying to fix. In the process I was transferring items from one keychain to another and had 100+ dialogs pop up asking me to enter my password to allow each individual item. Once started, there was no way to cancel the dialogs easily, no way to bulk authenticate, no way to see/sort the windows and no way to associate any particular dialog with any particular to know where I was in the process if I did decide to abort and start again. Fun times.

Granted this was an edge case and is not the norm. It was still a pretty horrid UX.

Plug in a phone and a popup steals focus. Some photo thing.

True, but you probably won't be actively working in some other app when that happens. Your hands were, up until that point, actively involved in connecting the phone to the laptop. It's still a bit annoying - maybe you only wanted to plug in the phone in order to charge it. But I'd say for that moment, the phone is your focus, and the pop-up app is related to that.

I plug in the phone to charge it or to test an app I'm writing, so no, the phone is not my focus and the pop-up is not related to what I'm doing.

A much better solution is a notification, which is what Windows and KDE do.

For each new phone. It's beyond annoying and can be embarrassing when Photos opens to reveal your colleague's pictures stored on his/her phone. I've learned to open Photos first and hide as much of the application as possible before plugging in a new phone.

I have the opposite experience. Focus stealing is such a problem for me in OSX to the point where I actually noticed the issue. I'm sure there's focus stealing in windows as well but never to the point where it got in the way of work.

> never are allowed to steal focus

How are they not 'allowed'? Because it is certainly allowed. Just about every app steals focus.

The biggest offender for me is Webex on macOS. Start conference, steals focus. Presenter switches, steal focus. Really annoying as I multitask (often to slack for coordination) at the same time.

I rarely, if ever, have focus stolen on my windows machines.

For a while I was using the Rocket.Chat desktop client. Sometimes an alert would just flash the taskbar, other times an alert would steal focus. I couldn't work out why only sometimes.