FYI, you should be able to go from Ventura to Tahoe if you wanted, but I would resist that urge for now & wait for at least the first or second update patch to Tahoe. Besides you need to do some research to make sure all of your third party apps are fully compatible with Tahoe.....sometimes it may take developers weeks or months, sometimes a year before their apps are fully compatible with a new OS.
You would be better off directly upgrading to Sonoma or Sequoia for now. If you upgrade to Sequoia directly, then you spare yourself two upgrade cycles. Another advantage of going with Sequoia is you will have fewer update patches to worry about.
FYI, I tried out a clean install of Tahoe on a test machine and I must say I will be upgrading to Sequoia instead of Tahoe (I don't even like Sequoia or Sonoma). The extreme rounded corners in my opinion are ridiculous and there are some aspects of the translucent interface that you cannot get rid of so you will see some awful overlaps for anything that scrolls beyond view. I suggest you look at some of the hands on reviews & screenshots before jumping into Tahoe since it will look a lot different than even Sequoia.
macOS is not supposed to automatically upgrade you to a new major version of macOS (I have heard it happens once in a while, but that should be rare). If System Settings is on your Dock, then you should see a red area alerting there is some notification....usually related to software updates.
Before you upgrade macOS to a new major version, make sure you have a good backup.
