Patched OTA full installer update to 14.1b3 23B5067a using 1.0.1 worked fine.
However, in hindsight Sonoma upgrade was not worth it after all. Notes, Mail, Messages search won't work. Photos still crashing constantly, reproducible. Keychain folder is filling up with 10s of GB temporary files. Upgrading to Sonoma is not worth the hassle. Doing this for fun, kind of a hobby its just fine. But from a productivity point of view, there is not much of a difference to Ventura or even BigSur. Performance is still the same ish as it was in HighSierra, at least on this machine, a 9,2.
Surely, widgets are neat, all the other small improvements are very welcome, keeping the MacOS secure is also important, but it's not worth putting those in a major update. There is no feature apart from latest security technologies, which are truly necessary.
After all, being an Apple user since 7.5.3 I feel the MacOS update cycle is way too small. Every 2 or 3 years would be totally fine. The problem Apple has is obvious. Newer, faster and more powerful hardware every year won't cut it anymore for the average user. A new OS neither. A true dilemma for Apple indeed. New is not better anymore.
Still I am grateful for the amazing work the developers put into this project. Thank you!