The new macOS 13 Monterey is available, but is a little bit rough, especially for anyone not on an Apple Silicon Mac.
I recommend waiting, for now, and will have an updated recommendation soon. I’m testing on my M1 MacBook Air, and will be testing soon on my wife’s 2019 MacBook Pro and my older iMac. I will also test soon on more hardware as I do upgrades for clients, and I’ll put any findings and updated recommendations here.
As always, before doing a major update, I recommend two local backups, with at least one of them a full disk image. Both Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! are excellent for local backups. The Samsung T7 external SSD is an excellent choice for media. But anything from a good brand with adequate speed will work. Be sure to get one at least as big as the internal storage of your Mac.
Apple Time Machine is also very useful, with it’s intuitive interface and easy access to a history of file changes. but if you have to recover from a catastrophic failure (like a bad upgrade attempt), it is much slower.
Also, while you wait, or especially if you decide you want to move forward, check to see that the software that you most use is ready. There’s a great over view of software status at RoaringApps: https://roaringapps.com/apps?platform=osx
More on the status of macOS 12 Monterey coming soon!