The specific example I was thinking of was unzip: MacOS couldn't handle zip files over 2GB. At least it couldn't back in 2016, with MacOS 10.11.4. I don't know if it's fixed now. if so, yay! But mainline unzip had fixed this in February 2005, so it took at least 11 years for that to propagate to Apple.

I asked a couple of AIs just now and they think most MacOS utilities now work with big files.