As I said on the original thread, I was mostly fortunate in that the update was consequence-free, although it still bothers me a little bit that I didn’t really think about it much until @Shamino mentioned it. I’m freshly middle-aged and technical, so I blame myself for that error of judgement. Unfortunately the operative word there is “mostly”; I can no longer use virtual machines due to a bug new in Sonoma, and so have had to BootCamp this 2020 iMac to run Windows post-haste, whilst I consider my options. Downgrading would not be something I want to do; neither would living without virtual machines. Looks like a new virtual machine manager is on the cards for me, or more of my time spent in Windows.
I feel bad for everybody who was hit by this and had legitimate reason to be put out. It’s no consolation that this was clearly a bug; it was still unacceptable.