If you're judging how much sympathy people "deserve" by what they spend their own money on, you deserve even less.
Here's the most basic thing about purchases: People spend money on what they think is worth it. So the millions of Mac users decided the drawbacks of Windows/PC weren't worth the money.
I think you're missing some nuances of the conversation here. A lot of Apple buyers celebrate the fact that Apple intentionally prevents interoperability with large swathes of software. So if someone is complaining that software doesn't work on an Apple product, they don't "deserve sympathy" because they've deliberately chosen a product where that is ostensibly a selling point.
What? Who is "celebrating" that Apple prevents interoperability? Unless you're saying that buying a macbook is equivalent to celebrating all of Apple's decisions, a clearly false equivalency?
Every time the EU forces Apple to open up some of their platform (USB C, alternative app stores, etc) there's a top comment in the thread saying how the new change makes Apple platforms somehow "ickier", that they chose Apple because of the walled garden-ness that somehow makes it safer, and so on.
Here's the most basic thing about purchases: People spend money on what they think is worth it. So the millions of Mac users decided the drawbacks of Windows/PC weren't worth the money.