I *NEVER* start from a clean install of my macOS systems. I fact, I consider this one of macOS's super powers. I love having a heavily customized environment and I just want my system to move with me as I get new hardware.
But let me explain what I mean:
* I use a one of add-ons, custom utilities, many applications. * I have, VS Code, BBEdit, Brew * 10 third-party apps controlled by Bartender in my menu bar, . * have full, nodejs and python development environments. * have Postrges * I have much of Office 365 installed * I could go on ...
When I started using Mac's in the mid-1990's I came from MS-DOS, Windows and OS/2. I was amazed that I could simply do a drag-and-drop file copy of a Mac OS 7 Startup Disk to another disk and boot the system. This also worked by attaching a new computer to your old via SCSI Target Disk Mode. So I could copy my old system to my new system and be up and running in an identical environment in almost no time.
Since then, things have gotten more complicated. You would have to use a tool like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to copy your system. But it still worked.
More recently, the Apples M-series processor computer mean that you pretty much have to use Migration Assistant. But still you get your whole system migrated. When I moved to an M1 MacBook, I did a deep dive to clean up my system. I found configuration files with creation dates back to 1998
Let that sink in. 1998
I have in some sense been now been using the SAME system for over 25 years. I actually think it would be a few more years, but I think I did a copy operation that reset the creation dates on my files in 1998.
I am not going to say this has always been easy. Sometimes, I have had to use my deep knowledge of the system to keep going. But it has been at least 15 years since I had any significant issues during migration.
I will also say, while my preferred system is macOS, I am a heavy user of Windows, Linux servers and Linux KDE Desktops. I can not imaging keeping a Windows or Linux system running so long.