I've been tempted to pick up a 2008 MacBook Air lately, since I discovered that their hard drives were the same as Apple used in the 4th gen iPod Classic. Given that you can buy an iFlash SD mod for that iPod, it therefore stands to reason that you could, theoretically, push the Air's storage up to 1tb.
They're still a little pricey for "let's get one and fuck about with it" though.
I have a dual boot with High Sierra and Monterey. I went first for Monterey but my Terascale 1 GPU was causing the screen to flicker constantly and would not work with a second monitor. For some reason High Sierra was more stable. Then two weeks ago OCLP released another root patch which fixed all the problems of the Terascale 1 GPU and now they both work fine so I will probably upgrade Monterey to Ventura later this week.
Personally, I have several machines running OCLP in one form or another.
2015 15" MacBook Pro (Ventura)
2011 13" MacBook Pro (Monterey)
2011 mini (Monterey)
My primary device is the 2015 that's patched to run Ventura. The two 2011's don't support don't support Metal graphics at all, so I've been loathe to push them as far as Ventura. I also have a 2014 mini that's running stock Monterey, because honestly, Ventura doesn't offer enough to bother messing about with it.
From my perspective, I'd rather not feel like I have to spend £1500+ every five years just so I can run the newest, most secure OS. The 2015 MBP only cost me £420 last summer, and it's a monster. It runs a little warmer than I'd like, but I put that down to something in OCLP, or the fact that it's an eight year old computer running on Intel silicon.