If I wanted to set up a rancher cluster on mac os which is as close as possible to a production one (so several nodes, not too many abstraction layers that solve things automatically and stuff like that), what would you recommend I do?

so you want to run rancher locally and have it mimic your production environment as close as possible?

Basically yes.

This can be done it will be a matter of size, your prod env vs your laptop. Meaning if your laptop isn't big enough to handle your prod env then that will be one of a few limitations.

But rancher desktop wouldn't be the way to go, right? I haven't seen any support for multiple nodes.

It depends on the use case. I have seen people run Rancher on Rancher Desktop to support airgap environments when they are onsite. I would recommend the standard way to deploy rancher

I was asking about multiple nodes. It doesn't support setting up a cluster with several nodes, right?

Rancher does yes.

Rancher itself, yes, obviously. But Rancher Desktop doesn't, I suppose.