Honestly the worst thing that’s happened with Apple is they keep hiding more and more of the incredible power the OS has to appease the Luddites that they keep trying to cater to. Would it be nice if Apple enabled read write by default, sure, but it would also be nice if they kissed and made up with Nvidia, if they finished bringing eGPU support to apple silicon, if they stop with stupid things like in system integrity protection, trying to deprecate kernel extensions, didn’t artificially try to prevent what iOS/iPad apps can run on Apple Silicon, not offering a boot camp alternative for arm-based OS’s, hiding the everything option when it comes to installing apps and many many more. Then there’s the third party plug-ins to do NTFS, well yes most of them are paid like tuxera or paragon there are Several free options as well.

(That said I found less reliable than some of the other alternatives but NTFS is a quick and easy thing to solve) Technically since mountain lion macOS has had native NTFS support, it’s just read only by default but a few modifications to some system files can make it read write, alternatively if you don’t like the terminal, there are free utilities that can enable it. I'm saying Mac should have native NTFS support, period. I'm not debating if NTFS sucks for external drives or not. If you can't upgrade and it's not worth repairing, what you're buying is a disposable device. Tomorrow I can go out and buy another 16 GB of RAM for my Mini.

New Mini's and Macbooks have everything soldered in so when the drive dies- and they all do eventually-you have to replace the whole logic board (including RAM and CPU). Next step: install Linux distro and, $300 all in, you have upgraded hardware running a light, contemporary, yet fully capable OS. I'd buy it for $200 too because $100 more will buy a SSD and double the RAM. 2012 was the last Mini model year that offered socketed, i.e., swappable, RAM & Drives. I've dove in a half dozen times over the years upgrading RAM and swapping out dead drives on this Mini. Typing this on a 2012 Mini (quad core i7/ 16 GB RAM/ Dual SSD's running Linux/Ventura). During last 10 years, I had 3 different thinkpads (T450s, T460s, T490s) which were just used for work (chrome, excel) but didn't last long as the MBP did. Macs might seem more expensive at the time of purchase, but they provide better value over time. My wife's 2012 mbp lasted more than 10 years and I was able to sell it for $200.

Ntfs on mac os x 10.7