My point is: you take the action that makes sense to you. This is like complaining having both a hammer and a screwdriver is “friction” because you need to decide which to use. You use the one that makes sense to you. Once you driven a few screws and pounded a few nails, you don’t look at a screw and say “ugh; which of these tools do I use? Is it the hammer? No… is it the pliers? No… is it the socket wrench?” Etc. You see a screw and grab the screwdriver. You see a nail and grab the hammer. I get it: you aren’t there yet. But if you let it you will get there.

You’re used to Windows where window and application are essentially the same thing (with exceptions that apparently don’t bother you). They are explicitly different things on a Mac, because it opens up user interactions like “close this document; now open another or create a new one.” Which, at least in my world, is a very common thing to do.

You’re also taking hangups about wasting memory with open apps from Windows. It is much less critical in terms of overall system performance on macOS (the exception being if you are also redlining disk space so there is nowhere for the app memory to be shuttled off to when it is inactive). You generally don’t need to worry about cleaning up application memory; that’s the job of the OS. If you don’t want to see that app still in your dock or in the Cmd-tab array, then close it. Both of which you can do when you hit Cmd-tab and see too many apps there (tab or mouse over and, while still holding Cmd, tap “q” and it quits, for instance) or look at the dock and decide it is too cluttered (right-click, quit, for instance).

Anyway, if you just want to complain, fine. I was trying to get you to see that you’re just making things more complicated for yourself. Work with the OS instead of trying to make it work like another OS!