Actually, I'm running Monterey on mac mini late-2012 with i7 and 16G of RAM and if I don't apply the root patches, I don't have transparency or acceleration in the UI. After root patching for the first time and then installing apple patch later down the road, OCLP reminded me it needs to re-apply those patches.

Have another macbook air 11" (early 2014) that's stuck on Big Sur. Mentally valuing the options - last monterey patch fixed two 0-days, there's no patch for big sure. So is it better to go with Monterey and sacrifice a bit of SIP?

csrutil looks like this, FWIW: $ csrutil status System Integrity Protection status: unknown (Custom Configuration).

Configuration: Apple Internal: disabled Kext Signing: enabled Filesystem Protections: disabled Debugging Restrictions: enabled DTrace Restrictions: enabled NVRAM Protections: enabled BaseSystem Verification: enabled

This is an unsupported configuration, likely to break in the future and leave your machine in an unknown state.