Full disclosure...

I posted on here last week about upgrading my late 2011 MBP to Sonoma using OCLP 1.01. I have 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD.

Full disclosure, after a few days, I was not happy with it. It ran like a dog, and surfing the web was becoming very tedious. I have since rolled back to Big Sur, and after a few days with it, I'm very pleased with the performance. It's a little slower than Catalina but far more stable, and it's a lot faster than Sonoma. I haven't compromised on any functionality - I use dynamic background, auto light/dark, my sidebar is packed with widgets, and I run multiple apps simultaneously. It's still way smoother than Sonoma. The only thing I really miss about Sonoma was the desktop widgets. Note: Google maps is still broken sadly.

As for that discussion I had in comments about browsers, I've switched to Edge and I'm very happy with it. My issues with Gsuite integration on various non-Chrome browsers must have been a Catalina problem (or at least a problem with my old Catalina install). Just to note that I also tested Opera GX fairly extensively since it claims to limit RAM usage, but I found the browser a little too slow (and ugly) for my liking.

As to how I rolled back, because some people may be interested, here's the whole annoying saga. I tried to just install Big Sur over Sonoma using OCLP - it refused because you can't just roll back like that (in retrospect, duh). I tried installing the Catalina patcher using the dosdude1 guide which does delete your drive in disk utility. I must have done something wrong, because it ended up creating a partition, and suddenly I now had a choice of booting with Catalina or Sonoma. I then decided to start from scratch because I had no idea how else to stop this madness, so I used the Apple reinstall guide to get a fresh install. An error happened in the download and as I'd already disk utility deleted the drive, there was no way to boot the machine. Good thing I had Catalina on a bootable USB so I booted from that, followed the dosdude1 guide again, and did a fresh install of Catalina. From there, I downloaded OCLP again and upgraded to Big Sur. That was again a bit of a faff as it did that 'keep looping back to the start of the install' thing a bunch of times, but eventually it booted. I made sure to do the root patching just to be extra sure, and then finally all was well. TLDR downgrading is a bitch and I should have time machined before upgrading to Sonoma.

Anyway I hope all of this is helpful to anyone out there who might be running into similar issues.