I don't like write a big wall of text for telling a history but this is my experience going from Catalina to Big Sur and back to Mojave.
I'm a developer and I have to test my software from macOS 10.11 (El Capitan) to the newest macOS available (Big Sur), my machine is a 6 core 2,6 GHz MacBookPro 2018 16GB ram - 500GB SSD, I mistakenly updated my machine to Catalina some months ago, then after several bugs, crashes, general slowdowns, and poor battery life, I made the jump to macOS Big Sur Beta 5 hoping for restoring some of the peppiness of my machine, some speed gained but still, the battery life was bad, only 4 o 5 hours at most, lots of bugs in XCode, and several incompatibilities in some drivers for hardware that I use. The strategy to me was always put the newest macOS in my laptop and then install older macOS in VMs for testing, but the tradeoffs that I have to made with Catalina (and Big Sur) was too much, the lost of 32bit compatibility, losing almost all my steam games, losing Wine, losing previous perfectly working VSTs, then the awful battery life, noisy and hot machine when connected to my external 4k monitor, and slower performance almost on everything, was too much for me. Long story short I downgraded to Mojave and now I'm getting near to 8-9 hours of battery life, my MacBook Pro feel snappier and it's not overheating any more, all my software and hardware works, rock-solid XCode and dev tools, I set up my dev environment to the inverse, Catalina and Big Sur in VMs for testing and development on Mojave. Now I'm happy but at the same time sad because for the first time like a Mac User (from 1993) and Mac Dev (from 2000) I had to downgrade my main OS to had a fast a reliable machine.
I'm a developer and I have to test my software from macOS 10.11 (El Capitan) to the newest macOS available (Big Sur), my machine is a 6 core 2,6 GHz MacBookPro 2018 16GB ram - 500GB SSD, I mistakenly updated my machine to Catalina some months ago, then after several bugs, crashes, general slowdowns, and poor battery life, I made the jump to macOS Big Sur Beta 5 hoping for restoring some of the peppiness of my machine, some speed gained but still, the battery life was bad, only 4 o 5 hours at most, lots of bugs in XCode, and several incompatibilities in some drivers for hardware that I use. The strategy to me was always put the newest macOS in my laptop and then install older macOS in VMs for testing, but the tradeoffs that I have to made with Catalina (and Big Sur) was too much, the lost of 32bit compatibility, losing almost all my steam games, losing Wine, losing previous perfectly working VSTs, then the awful battery life, noisy and hot machine when connected to my external 4k monitor, and slower performance almost on everything, was too much for me. Long story short I downgraded to Mojave and now I'm getting near to 8-9 hours of battery life, my MacBook Pro feel snappier and it's not overheating any more, all my software and hardware works, rock-solid XCode and dev tools, I set up my dev environment to the inverse, Catalina and Big Sur in VMs for testing and development on Mojave. Now I'm happy but at the same time sad because for the first time like a Mac User (from 1993) and Mac Dev (from 2000) I had to downgrade my main OS to had a fast a reliable machine.
