Seems like there were some missteps with introducing the M3, but macOS on existing hardware has been pretty good for me.
(Before someone starts about Snow Leopard, the early Snow Leopard releases were also pretty buggy, only near the end of the release cycle did it get good.)
I don't update to new major releases immediately if I can help it, though.
This is one of the most misunderstood things about software releases. It's an iron law: major software updates always introduce more bugs than they fix. What you need is a lot of minor bug fix updates between the major updates, and Snow Leopard had about 2 years of bug fixes releases. What people remember fondly is not Mac OS X 10.6.0 but rather 10.6.8 v1.1.
Apple's annual major release schedule is just too rapid to leave any time to fix bugs. They need to go back to 2 years or more between major releases.
If you don't count all the shitty Catalyst and Swift UI first party apps. If you don't count things like even switching keyboard layouts is a second-long animation that swallows keystrokes. If you don't count things like this: https://twitter.com/krzyzanowskim/status/1707684940337283563 or this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/05/12/the-apple-services-experi... or this: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/12/27/ventura-issues/ or...