There’s a great video of a NeXT-era Steve Jobs keynote floating around—I think the one where he announces the x86 port as NeXT was transitioning to a software-only company—where he specifically calls out DriverKit and how great it is.
Steve was not a developer but he made it his business to care about what they cared about.
Yeah - even from the start, I remember NeXT marketing was spending a disproportionate amount of their time selling NeXT’s “object technology”, AppKit and Interface Builder, DPS as an advanced graphics model. It was good hunch from Steve, given how how modern NeXTSTEP feels in retrospect.
For some reason, though, it means that people overlook how NeXT’s hardware was _very_ far from fast. You weren’t going to get SGI level oomph from m68k and MO disks.
Steve was not a developer but he made it his business to care about what they cared about.