which jdbc (connector/j) to install for mac os
MySQL Connector/J is a Java library, and it is a pure Java driver, so it is platform independent. The various installers offered on the download page are just to simplify installation (although generally, installing Java libraries using an installer makes very little sense to me).
For MacOS, you can use 'platform independent' and either download the tar.gz or the zip, whichever you feel is simpler to unpack.
For development purposes, it would be simpler to use the Maven dependency.