I used to think Apple Support was pretty darn good, until this happened

If you have Apple store where you are, schedule a meeting with genius bar technician. I believe Apple support has moved overseas and you may have difficulty understanding their language.

I’ve always seen research as more helpful than support, because they’re so darn incompetent 99.5% of the time. That being said, if you go to your local Apple Store if you have one, the experience is pretty amazing, I’ve never seen such a good customer experience ever, that being said, Our customer experience is more like, oh, you want a refund? I don’t know, I’m not feeling it today, I’ll just say it’s not covered or something. So maybe my standards are real low

I don't know if you can avoid data loss, with time machine probably, but apple support have articles on how to install multiple versions of macos and we can easily downgrade that way.
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/118282

Did you try grabbing the installer package directly from Apple bypassing the App Store, I’m not sure if you can do it with an IPSW, but it might work.

Sorry, I have no answer. Just this warning. I downgraded once and found that my iTunes library still behaved as if it had the more recent version. That is, the downgraded Music app could not access my music files. Beware.

As we’ve discussed before, I think it’s a better idea to visit an Apple Store to help with software issues. The main reason I say this is that it’s more one-on-one, and you can get them to understand your problem better than trying to explain it over the phone.

I have the 15.4 and it is fine. Try to see what might be causing your problems with the current version of your MacoS. Downgrading might not solve your problems.

I advise the cleanest and quickest solution, which is to put your MBP in DFU mode and blast it with another Mac. Using a USB stick works but it's not really the same procedure as on Intel Macs, you need to carefully delete the old volume group from Recovery before you install, as the Mac technically now boots from an internal partition rather than the USB as such, which just contains the installer.

Also, and this may not be apparent, but try using another port for your USB stick. Yes I know it's crazy, but Apple has documented that booting USB from the DFU port will not work. So you need to identify which port is your DFU port, and then *not* use that port for the USB stick.

Again though, remember that as Paul said, downgrading may not actually be the best option here if you have data that is no longer compatible with an older version, such as your Apple Music library.

As your problem is related to having issues with VoiceOver, would Apple's accessibility team be able to help you?

With Apple Silicon, things around booting, installing and cloning have got really hairy, to the point that it's best to always take the path of least resistance and do your best with your existing backups, just like on iOS really. It's crazy, but you're not supposed to think of Macs and macOS as an open system, because it's not; you instead work within the confines allowed you.

Good luck with it.

I very rarely use support of any type because of issues like this. I've never used Apple support in my life, the people here on Applevis are likely to know more anyway. In the past, I've found some subreddits with people far more knowledgeable about general Microsoft stuff than the people on the Microsoft community forums. I wonder if there are any good Apple subreddits, there might be people there who could give you a clear yes or no on how to downgrade. But you've received some possibilities in this very same thread anyway. At Brad, I agree, there should be disabled people in these types of accessibility support roles. As for VoiceOver specific stuff and YouTube, it might be worth giving a public shout-out to Google on Twitter or another social media platform. Far less hassle than staying on the phone for ages. But if you were talking to an accessibility department, then that's truly shocking. If you tell them publicly on Twitter you can't do x or y with VoiceOver, the issue might gain some traction.

But I can't anymore. Put this in the Re: just about *every* tech support is bad file, and having blind people won't necessarily fix it.

Internet Explorer updates, to version five, if that tells you how far back this goes. I was running JFW, of course it stopped working. SO I went into the JFW script for IE and changed the version number to 5 or 5.5 or whatever the new one was. It sort of worked. So I called tech support.

After explaining what was going on, JFW tech support dude, this was back when they were Freedom Scientific and nobody else, tells me I'm not running IE five. I tell him I absolutely *am* running it. He says that's impossible. I ask him why. He says, and I'm quoting here, "because JFW doesn't work with it". So I turn on the external speakers, crank them up, hold the phone up to them, and get JFW to read the IE version number. He insisted that couldn't be right.

At that point, I ended the call, and I believe that was the first time I seriously started using Firefox, JFW's support for it had just gotten to the point where it was really usable, for the most part. I'm not necessarily trying to slam JFW's tech support, well OK a bit, because that's pretty bad, essentially telling me I'm lying. But I mean, maybe the dude had a bad day or something, I dunno. And to be fair, I'm pretty sure they got new IE working fairly quickly, I remember a couple weeks to a month, but it was a good while back, so that could be wrong.

Their tech support is really great for basic stuff, i.e. getting your stuff activated if there's an issue. But that's true of a lot of companies really. Once you get past the basics, it's really hard to find somebody who really knows what they're doing.

Like I bought a router once that kept dropping telnet connections. I had to go through like four or five people before I found somebody who A. knew what a telnet connection and keepalive were, B. why I wanted to set keepalive, and then told me that it wasn't something I could and he had no idea when or if they'd ever change that, needless to say I returned the router and bought one that didn't drop connections.

Apple support has worked pretty well for me. But yeah as the above comment I said, once you start getting into the more difficult stuff, that’s when you might hit a few brick walls, or maybe more.

They're there to keep the plebes well away from the engineers. Don't be too hard on them. The real issue is finding someone who is at least humble enough to recognise that you've got a problem and pass you on if necessary. The trouble is that, often, sadly, usually for reasons of job security, this does not happen and management rewards incentives that aren't good for the customer. Glorious capitalism!

This summarizes it pretty well.