What's the community's general opinion on the best versions of macOS for various older laptops?

From what I've gleaned from going through this community so far, it seems like there are two general principles:

• Big difference between GPUs with Metal support vs those without (aka MacBook Pros/Airs from 2012+, and 2015-2017 MacBooks);
• There are a few categories of similar kinds of OSes: (A) Mojave and Catalina I think of as basically the last vestiges of the "Mac OS X"-style OS (even though they were called macOS by that point); (B) Big Sur and Monterey are similar; and (C) Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia are fairly similar to each other.

What are folks' take on which of these OSes/groups of OSes work best on older MacBook Pros and on the 12" MacBooks? I'm trying to get a sense of which OSes work the best without having to reinstall and test for weeks for each one.

More specifically, I am curious whether people have noticed much of a difference between Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia on a 2016 12" MacBook?