Restoring from a backup is of course something I would have resorted to if it would have been necessary, but the point I tried to make was that it was not necessary because there was a much quicker way to get back up to speed.

Also not sure if the time machine backup would reinstall all the apps and settings exactly as they were before, but maybe it would, I honestly don't know the Apple ecosystem well enough for that.

All I know was that a friend of mine had a very similar issue recently with a Macbook (don't ask me which one) and she had the problem that not all data was on the time machine, some recent stuff was there, some not so recent stuff was missing and some even older stuff was there again. That's probably some user error but she was expecting everything to be backed up correctly so she did not even know that there was a problem.