Time Machine restores vs. migration?

This may only be marginally related to OCLP, but since that is what triggered the problem I'll ask here. I have a late 2012 imac (13,1) updated normally to Catalina, and was able to erase the hard drive and restore it from the latest time machine backup. I was counting on that continuing to work with backups made after using OCLP to update to Sonoma and Sequoia, but now that I need it, those later backups will not restore - trying from the bootable installer that OCLP makes says I need to reinstall MacOS and then use migration assistant. Is that normal for those later MacOS versions or some quirk about how they were made?

My real issue is that I'm getting errors in the process of re-installing Sequoia (15.01) and using migration assistant and can't get all the way through it. It's possible that my hardware is failing but there's nothing specific about the error messages to tell what it is.

I'm trying now to restore back to my last Catalina backup and then upgrade that to Sequoia again but that will miss some things saved in the later backups.

submitted by /u/Ok_Appointment_8166
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