To be honest I so far have never had to restore an entire Mac from an rsync backup (or TM for that matter). It’s always been either directly from a Mac or from a clone (used to use DiskUtility for that, these days usually SuperDuper).
I have however restored many files and folder of all sorts from rsync backups and never encountered any real trouble. The crucial flag on macOS appears to be -E. To “emulate” TM I usually end up using -aE.