That’s weird, TeXlive is fully supported on Windows, Mac and Linux of course. If you’re using a Mac then it could be easier to install MacTeX https://tug.org/mactex/ it is TeXlive fully adapted to MacOS and IMO it’s easier to install instead of TeXlive vanilla for Mac.
About Tectonic, as far as I know, you need underneath it a TeX distro (such MacTex), to make the compilation run properly, but although it saves you the appearance of auxiliary files in your directory, it is extremely slow compared to compiling directly from pdflatex or lualatex.
Anyway, I guess some goodness will have to be worth the development effort, but so far I haven’t noticed it.