macOS Sequoia Struggles…

My institution’s media studio is currently inking out another year of life out of three 2019 iMacs 🙄. Someone got the bright idea to update these to Sequoia a few weeks ago, much to my dismay, as I often consumed much of the RAM on the previously running Ventura. Two of them are still running fine. One, however, has not fared well. The entire memory is being consumed on startup, to the point that the Mac crashes even in my efforts to log in through safe mode. Since our new Macs won’t be here til June, is it worth booting into recovery and slowly working my way back up from Catalina to Ventura?