How do you set up a macos box from scratch? Don't you end up having to either manually install a bunch of apps, or wade through installs via brew or macports?

How do you set up a macos box from scratch? Don't you end up having to either manually install a bunch of apps, or wade through installs via brew or macports? I'm a little salty as just after I had a working setup on macos, the ventura upgrade crashed and I had to wipe my system partition to be able to install ventura - and then had to set up most things all over again (minus a few config files I had in a git repo). Say what you will about Debian/RedHat/SuSe - but at least they come with thousands of binary packages that are tested together and generally work out of the box, and come with a stability guarantee and security patches.