The early MacOS era as well as pretty much the entire classic Mac OS era was infamous for being a more-or-less do it yourself environment for adding bits the OS didn't have or did sub-optimally for given use cases.
The wisdom of such a freewheeling ecosystem in today's era is maybe debatable, but given how user-hostile the mainline OS and software vendors can be, I say there's still plenty of room for that ecosystem and it should be preserved.
The old OS was awesome in that way. As extensions loaded the would appear in sequence at the bottom of the screen when a driver failed the boot would lock-up and one could reboot with extensions off change the boot order or remove the driver from the system folder. Very easy to mess with.
ever since that was how you did device drivers. If you anything interesting, hardware wise, it came with drivers that required help from inside the kernel, and maybe you can argue that was different but it's still kernel level stuff that normal users had to install.
