Had you waited a few weeks you could have skipped Big Sur altogether. I just installed Monterey beta 8 so the gold-master is unlikely to be far behind. All the other Apple OS variants are already on the x.1 beta 2 release and macOS won't be allowed to stay that far out or sequence. For what it is worth, all of the stability issues I had encountered in previous betas, disappeared in beta 7 and as far as I can tell beta 8 is mostly some rare esoteric bug fixes.
Even though Monterey is more or less imminent, I decided that I'd be more comfortable dealing with the upgrade one step at a time.
