I just bought a Mac 3 weeks ago, and I am a longtime Windows user (and still using one as my main desktop PC).

I am a researcher, and my experience has been a little different. I have greatly appreciated Mac's keyboard shortcuts, battery life, sleep management settings, screen, and graphical gui.

I have found the Macos terminal is a lot friendlier to use than Windows terminals. I have had no problems writing git or system commands.

My main issue was that the finder is NOTHING like Windows explorer. While, you can set finder to have many of the features of explorer (like display hidden files, display directory location e.t.c), it's not as tidy or neat as Windows. Hidden files also have to be enabled for every folder, not just at once. So there are some aspects which are a little clunkier.

The files disappearing into the void is an issue I have had as well. I have found you absolutely have to specify the location when you save as. But, if you still cannot find files after that, to me personally that suggests a possible software issue (I am not an expert, just my intuition).