I hope most Intel Mac users avoided macOS 26. I kept my remaining Intel Mac on macOS 15, even though it supports macOS 26. It's not as bad as those poor folks who got stuck on OS X Lion many years ago, but it just felt wrong to move to a new (and somewhat broken) OS knowing the machine would likely never get the eventual fixes.
I did the same, my Intel MacBook Pro will stick to macOS 15 forever. I won't update to Tahoe which is clearly a botched beta with no further updates.