Bluetooth disabled after upgrade from Monterey to Ventura on intel-based Mac mini 2018

Hi all,

Stumped on this one and I'm hoping someone has figured this out. So I've been using Monterey on my 2018 intel Mac Mini with no issues. I didn't want to upgrade to Sonoma because I've read there are performance issues with intel-based Macs on Sonoma, which is optimized for the Apple Mx chips. So I decided to upgrade to Ventura (13.7.5).

The upgrade completed with no visible errors or warnings, however, now that I'm on Ventura, the bluetooth module is disabled and can not be started. If I go to Settings > Bluetooth, the slider is off, and if I try to slide it to on, it immediately goes to off.

I've tried removing the /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist, but it doesn't get re-created.

I also deleted the ones from ~/Library/Preferences (com.apple.bluetoothuserd.plist, com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.mouse.plist, com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.trackpad.plist), and these ones get re-created when I log in.

I tried resetting my NVRAM and SMC settings, no impact.

I went to recovery mode and did a reinstall of Ventura (saw someone else had done this and was successful), no change.

Safe mode boot, no change.

I was going to use Time Machine to do an restore full OS backup back to Monterey, but it turns out can't do that any more, after Catalina, Time Machine just backs up the data volume(s), since the OS volume is in a read only container.

I have not done a full internet recovery, since that'll take me back to the original Catalina, but as part of that, I'll have to wipe everything since that's not on APFS which is what I'm on now.

Looking at the hardware info I see no MAC address for the Bluetooth Controller and the firmware version appears to be uninitialized:

To me that looks like the kext(s) for the bluetooth in Ventura dropped support for these older Broadcom chipsets (BCM_4350C2). When looking at dmesg I do see some interesting failures that look like sandbox protection errors (perhaps introduced in Ventura?). See attached dmesg logs.

Short of wiping out everything and starting over at Catalina, migrating back to Monterey, then reinstalling all my apps and data, is there anything else I can try to get the bluetooth controller to activate so I can turn it on.

Luckily, I'm using a hardwired mouse and keyboard, or I'd really be hosed. As is, I can't use my track pad, which is painful to lose but I can work without it, but I also can't use my bluetooth headset, which prevents me from doing conference calls, and that's a hard stop.

Doing searches on this topic, and I see a lot of people have had issues with bluetooth when going to Ventura, but those were on very early releases of Ventura. Some tried to go to Sonoma, and still had no luck. I didn't want to try Sonoma because it's optimized for the Apple silicon and there are performance issues on the intel-based Macs.

Anyone have ideas on what I can try next? I've ordered an ASUS USB-A bluetooth dongle, but I have no idea whether that's going to work or not. Since all Macs come with integrated bluetooth, there's not really a third party market for those (almost everything is targeted for Windows, Linux).

Thanks!

//Robert