The hours I save not having to maintain or upgrade it is well worth the small premium price. As is the extreme hardware reliability. My last MacBook Pro (Intel) was bought in mid-2014 and retired mid last year. Eight years of service with very few problems. At the end, the battery had given up, the screen occasionally went blank and a couple of charger cords had frayed. But the updates still installed and it still ran with almost zero attention. That appliance ease of use, minimal maintenance effort, and consistent UI across years make it very worthwhile for me. My time is valuable (and being almost 72 years old, I want to use every minute the best I can).
That's a recurring theme I hear from Mac users and is the #1 use case I've heard over the years for Macs.
The reason Mac's requires so little maintenance effort and upkeep is also due to the limited hardware stack it supports.
The "I plug it in, and it just works!" is the second most recurring theme I hear from Mac users. "It works" because the hardware ecosystem for Mac's is very small comparatively speaking and very tightly controlled.
Not so for Microsoft. With the plethora of choices Windows users have in hardware (motherboards, GPU's, CPU's, memory, disk, printers, peripherals) numbering in the tens of thousands of different components it's no wonder Microsoft has had issues with hardware compatability over the years.
I imagine if I were "coming up" in computers today I'd probably go Mac for reasons you cite. As I'm 60 and I date all the way back to Timex Sinclair ZX-80's, TRS-80's, Commie 64's, acoustic couplers, 110/300/1200/2400/9600/56k modems, and so on, I'm more used to dealing with the technical complexities of non-Mac ecosystems.
Having built my own computers since the early 1980's, dealing with all the technical challenges and complexities has at least kept my mind young even though physically I'm falling part, LOL!
Best to you and appreciate your response.