I remember looking forwards to OS X. It was a radical departure from the previous OS and I was mainly looking forward to the stability, after becoming used to system crashes (e.g. using System 7.5).
Before OS X came out, there was talk (for years) about what Apple would do, such as developing its own next generation OS, taking on NeXTSTEP, using BeOS, or something else...
I've been sceptical of deeming Big Sur to be so radically different as to become macOS 11, having been used to 20 years of variants of OS X. Then again, System 7, 8, and 9 were not so fundamentally different to one another either!
