> Did you reinstall OS, or it works as upgrade?

I reinstalled thr os from clean when I swapped-out the storage, so unfortunately I can't comment on the upgrade path.

The machine periodically prompts me to upgrade to Ventura - which I keep declining as Monterrey is fine for my purposes[1] at the moment - so it's obviously happy to do an upgrade.

[1] Running Visual Studio for Mac to build .net apps for MacOS