[tylerhall]

OP here. I never installed Catalina (or any recent beta software in years) on my primary machine that I get work done on. My Catalina testing this Summer was explicitly kept to an old laptop and virtual machines.

My "simpler" comment was about my mistake in signing into iCloud on those test devices. I learned my lesson and either stayed logged out or used a test iCloud account for the rest of the Summer.

And, overall, my post and comments in general are about running Catalina now that it's publicly released. Not about issues I experienced as a beta user.