All we needed was for vendors to ship development tools with the OS. Nobody ever did that. Apple could include Xcode on every Mac, but they don't. macOS and Windows... neither of them come with a code editor.
The benefits are obvious. The downsides (disk space?) are not. Why didn't anyone ever do this?
EDIT: Nevermind. Xcode used to ship on the MacOS discs.
They did! Back when there were Mac OS X install discs, in the 2000s, every Mac came with the Xcode developer tools on disc as an optional install.
That's the only reason I'm a programmer today. So I would say that in an important sense, the Mac did bring programing to the people. And back in those days, there seemed to be a lot more amateur Mac developers than there are now (and possibly more professional Mac developers too).
The benefits are obvious. The downsides (disk space?) are not. Why didn't anyone ever do this?
EDIT: Nevermind. Xcode used to ship on the MacOS discs.