macOS absolutely has sandboxing, what are you talking about? But the reality is that you need custom sandboxing tools less when you don't have basic problems like "anything that runs ever can read my ~/.ssh directory without problem" or "you can hijack my password by interposing sudo and thus do anything". This does not matter because macOS will see a program signed by Corp XYZ is trying to read data not owned by that cryptographic signature, and it can't escape the code signature check, and it will flag it. A program cannot simply read your password from stdin and elevate privileges silently, because granting new privileges requires communicating with a higher privilege program so it can delegate to you, and that program has a non spoofable prompt. And so on.
You can use Linux's sandboxing functionality to make a pretty hardened server. If you take in mind the physical deployment and go the extra mile, it can be very secure. The Linux desktop is not and will never be secure in its current form from things like extremely basic local malware. You would have to redesign much of the desktop stack from the init system downward so you could easily do things signature-based identity, proper per-identity secure storage and key management, securitizing elevation of privileges, getting rid of setuid, etc.
They purposefully used a weasel word - "proper" - to shift the argument to being about their opinion on what a proper sandboxing system is.