I gather that more libre distributions are attempting something functionally similar via things like Snap and Flatpak, but I don't have much experience with either. I bring it up here because it's likely to add an extra wrinkle to finding source files under macOS, especially if the OS still comes with a (quite old, tty-only) version of emacs in /usr/local that should be ignored (MAYBE: except for site-lisp?) by modern emacs.
Hope that helps,
~Chad