After years of religiously making bootable backups I got a new M4 mini last month, when bootable backups were (temporarily, as we now know but didn’t then) out of the picture under 15.2. I didn’t immediately switch from data-only to bootable backups when they came back under 15.3, and this morning had an issue* that could have been solved in an instant if my last night’s backup had been bootable. Instead I lost the whole day in chats & calls with Apple support, who in the end couldn’t resolve it, and now face hours (probably weeks) of laborious manual troubleshooting.
Moral: if you can make a bootable clone, do it. Apple can deprecate it all they like, but I wish to god I’d ignored them harder.
*For the curious, my mini suddenly only recognises two of the three connected displays at a time; the HDMI one is only recognised if I disconnect one of the Thunderbolt ones. (But this thread isn’t the place for bright ideas on that!)