I think that only happens when one of the phones doesn’t support MMS (which afaik is pretty much just ancient flip phones unless your carrier doesn’t support it for some reason). Otherwise group chats work “fine” but with terrible image/photo quality
The T2 security chips on the later Intel MacBooks make this a lot harder on more recent ones, and that’s completely ignoring everything going on with the ARM ones (Asahi Linux seems pretty cool! I don’t have a Mac so I don’t know how usable it is though)