macOS has discoverability features that obviate the need for the "press alt" feature. You don't even need to know what menu contains your target.
Command-? (command shift /) opens the help menu with fast incremental search through all menubar items, showing you the shortcut of what you're interested in, and also allowing you to tap return to substitute the shortcut.
It’s a nice feature; a shame that it’s not discoverable (i.e. something people would think to look for when they need it, if they hadn't used it before.)
Personally, if I were designing it, I wouldn't have exposed it as a separate bar in the Help menu of the app; but rather just made it an API provider to the OS (sort of like how drag-and-drop data sources work), such that the OS search (Spotlight) could be made a "universal" search, capable of searching both the OS generally, and the currently-focused application specifically.
While I'm dreaming, imagine if you could go into Mission Control and start typing, and it'd highlight/focus the set of windows that "have" the text you're looking for (even if not necessarily scrolled into their viewport.) Like the search you can do in Safari's "tab overview" by pressing Cmd+F there, but across all windows of all apps. Once you've narrowed it down to one window, press Enter and that window will pop to the foreground—perhaps with that text pre-selected as if you had done a Cmd+F search within the app.
Or, something even less likely to happen: imagine if you could move your mouse by searching across the corpus of text visibly on-screen (presumably via interaction with the OS text-rendering layer), such that you could jump the cursor to a specific button; or even to the checkbox with a specific label.
a shame that it’s not discoverable (i.e. something people would think to look for when they need it, if they hadn't used it before.)
It's discovered when someone clicks on the "Help" menu at the top of every single screen. How much more discoverable can it be without resorting to Clippy-style intrusions?
I mean, help sounds like it would be helpful, but all it's used for is to do Help/About, and IIRC, Apple put About somewhere else. So what is an average person doing in the Help menu?
Also: The menu opened by Command-? can be browsed using Ctrl+P and Ctrl+N, like emacs, instead of the up and down keys if you want to move your hands less.
It's a killer combination, allowing you to run menu items with merely a vague notion of their name rather than a memorized jumble of modifier keys.
Command-? (command shift /) opens the help menu with fast incremental search through all menubar items, showing you the shortcut of what you're interested in, and also allowing you to tap return to substitute the shortcut.