That seems like a corporate IT failure, not a failure of anything else. We just got an M1 Macbook Pro and nearly half of our machines are already updated to Big

That seems like a corporate IT failure, not a failure of anything else. We just got an M1 Macbook Pro and nearly half of our machines are already updated to Big Sur and we haven't had any major issues. The only issue has been an old kext from Cisco that can't be approved anymore but it hasn't caused any major issues and Cisco has already let us know that there's an update to that incoming. In my experience, this transition has been way smoother so far (even with the limited input) than our changeover to Windows 10.