I agree a lot here - Apple's first party apps are a big part of what keeps me on macOS & in Apple's ecosystem. Preview alone is a superb app, Terminal.app is fast and reliable (I have had a lot of performance issues with iTerm2), Mail.app is my preferred mail client (I haven't found any other that I like as much on any platform!), Safari is my browser of choice (although I wish it could still run uBlock Origin), Keynote & Pages are by far my preference over Powerpoint/Word or Slides/Docs.
There are some apps that are less impressive though - Photos is merely okay but I haven't found anything else that does the job better, and Numbers is quite sluggish with larger sheets.
Have you tried Kitty? It blows iTerm2 and Terminal.app out of the water in performance. It's also feature rich, if you have wild terminal feature needs. I'm mostly in it for the speed, though.
There are some apps that are less impressive though - Photos is merely okay but I haven't found anything else that does the job better, and Numbers is quite sluggish with larger sheets.