Anyone know if there is any benefit to doing a reinstall vs just installing over current Ventura ? Is it for peace of mind, placebo?... Any quantitative comparisons ?

For myself, peace of mind. Previously I installed them over an existing system, never had any issues.

I have a repo for my dotfiles and install scripts so i can set up my system in like an hour

Any tips to setting up macOS dotfiles? I set up a new Mac today and was going to go that route but after trying to do a diff of "defaults read" and seeing that its thousands of lines largely unrelated to macOS I gave up and changed the obvious things using the settings menu and now just have to deal with all the other minor differences as they popup.

I can't help with that sorry, I keep the Mac settings on default as they are usually works for me, dotfiles only have terminal/vim/ssh/git settings :|

I find it quite nice, personally. Reinstalling yearly-ish allows me to examine what tools I'm using and see if I could replace/remove any of them.

This is the bigger thing, really, because the way macOS upgrades is basically to apply your existing setup over a new install.

Used to that... but once I accumulated a heap of AU plugins I just couldn't bear the thought of spending a weekend reinstalling all that again (plus most of them won't work with the new macOS on day one).

Maybe time to upgrade to Ventura now.

You can keep the machine clean and fast without wasting time with reinstalls

Tell us more, please.

I do this once a year, and takes like 2 hour. I don't consider this a waste of time as I can do it in the afternoon and not during work hours. I also have a secondary dev box so I could even do it while I'm working on other stuff.

Do you have a setup script to automate everything when you got a fresh system? How long does it take to start being productive after a fresh install?

Yup, using homebrew, I can install everything I need including GUI stuff. Without taking into MacOS install time into consideration, using my script it takes around 1 hour, tops.

I'm mostly a backend dev so I just install Docker and be done with my stack. The script installs the usual tools that I use for daily work, Slack/Discord, editors, browsers.

I’ve never reinstalled a Mac. I literally don’t know how to do that. I’ve upgraded my M1 Air to Sonoma yesterday and everything seems to be working, just as it did on Big Sur, Monterey and Ventura. My girlfriend still uses my 2013 MacBook upgraded all the way from Mavericks to Big Sur, and used as a dev machine most of that time, without an issue.

I didn't say that everyone should do it. I only started this about 3-4 years ago, and it was always working before that. I just like having a clean OS.