[microtonal]

Yeaahhh ... the secure enclave seems to have pooched the idea of a USB stick booter. Restore Mode works fine.

Maybe I misunderstood you, but you can make a bootable USB stick from the installer app:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Nah. That's not the issue. The issue is cloning my system, so I can basically have a portable workstation on a USB stick.

It's been a while, since that was possible.

The M-series just basically put a fork in it.

That, and CCC kept crashing the machine.

[cprecioso]

For cloning systems and making them bootable, the official option is to use Apple Software Restore (asr in the Terminal). CCC uses that under the hood though, so it might crash your system as well.