I tested restoring my restic backups to the same PC and it worked. If I was forced to use a mac and Apple's password manager, I'd probably do the same test, conclude it worked, and then later lose all my data. If you care about keeping your data, there's no substitute for understand how things work.

This is so critical. Not just verifying the hashes, not just restoring, but actually booting into it and opening the top 5-10 things you're going to care about.

If it's your personal stuff, skip it at your own peril. If it's a paid responsibility, that's what hourly billing is for (this incentive was much stronger when I learned netadmin, back before nvmes)

It's unreasonable to ask everyone to own a second computer just to test restoring backups on, and it sounds like doing the test on the same computer wouldn't have caught this problem.