Pretty much the entire suite of 1st party Apple programs are my favorite in their categories, across platforms.
Their "office" apps remind me of the lightweight non-LibreOffice options on Linux, like Gnumeric and Abiword, but better integrated, less janky, and I've never once seen any of them crash. I like that I can forget I even have them open in the background, they're so light. Which should be the case for practically everything given how powerful modern computers are, but, unfortunately, Electron exists.
A really nice thing I noticed about Pages is that if you use the defaults, your document turns out very nicely typeset with zero extra effort, at least to my untrained eyes. Which you’d expect from Apple and maybe any word processor, but I can’t say I’ve had that baseline experience with others.
Same for me. I cringe when I have to resort to MS Office to deal with some janky external doc or another. Excel has a gazillion functions. Numbers has less coverage, but it implements them pleasantly in a Mac-assed Mac app.
Same with Pages vs Word. I'm sure has power features some people can't live without. I can live without ‘em, in exchange for getting an ergonomic app that runs nicely on my OS.
I'd reach for Pages every time over Word, which, ironically, in my opinion is not very good at processing words. (99% of the time I use iA Writer in a Markdown workflow. If I specifically need WYSIWYG for something, it’s Pages every time.)
Their "office" apps remind me of the lightweight non-LibreOffice options on Linux, like Gnumeric and Abiword, but better integrated, less janky, and I've never once seen any of them crash. I like that I can forget I even have them open in the background, they're so light. Which should be the case for practically everything given how powerful modern computers are, but, unfortunately, Electron exists.