Interesting that the HFP is usable for you. When I've tried to get it working on Linux using blueman, pavucontrol and pulseaudio-bluetooth, switching to HFP is so terrible that I default back to the trusty 3.5mm TRRS jack for calls.
I haven't personally tried it on a MacBook but I do know that colleagues seem to use their bluetooth headphones just fine with no clear quality drop.
Edit: actually there might have been some movement on this after all? Some comments in that ticket seem to indicate that this has been improved on master.
Thanks for linking this, I hadn't come across this before. You're right there does seem to be some very recent progress. I'll have a go with what's in the master branch there.
Yes - I get the same (good) performance as Windows on multiple Linux machines. I'm running Fedora which may help, but I had to do no fiddling - just worked 'out of the box'.
I haven't personally tried it on a MacBook but I do know that colleagues seem to use their bluetooth headphones just fine with no clear quality drop.