migration assistant

Theoretically no, but I had a terrible experience recently as I could not get the Migration Assistant app to launch on the old Mac (mysterious authentication issues...may have to wait 15 minutes & try again as well). There was no explanation and all the searches gave me nothing relevant as the issue was with the old Mac & not the new one.

I had to sign out of my AppleID (should have tried just signing out of iCloud first), then the Migration Assistant app was able to launch on the old Mac. Once I figured that part out the data transfer was easy, but I had issues on the new Mac when trying to add my AppleID again....had to sign out again in order to agree to the new Terms & Conditions even though I had previously agreed to them before enabling the AppleID on the new Mac.

Also had issues re-enabling AppleID on the old Mac as well.

By default macOS tends to enable a lot of iCloud features by default which I don't use, so I had to later disable those parts and I had to customize AppleID / iCloud related settings on the new Mac. Plus I had to go to my iPhone and add the ability to send/receive standard text messages through the Messages app on the new computer.

With both the old & new laptops, when signing into AppleID again, I encountered issues with the new Apple Multi-Factor Authentication with the Trusted Devices ...the codes did not appear on every device. The codes appeared on my phone once for the one laptop, but not the other laptop so I finally found them on the old laptop (not sure what I would do if I did not have it there as my other "trusted devices" were not available beyond my iPhone). It did not help Apple had multiple pop-ups appear which quickly disappeared before they could be read or acknowledged since the top most one had the "Ok" button and everything beneath it was gone.

A few other macOS specific settings did not transfer probably because Apple revamped the whole System Preferences into the new System Settings app...definitely a pain to locate these things in the new app.

All of my third party apps transferred & worked just fine though.

Just keep this in mind if you encounter any issues...the problem may be related to being signed into iCloud/AppleID. Keep your other Trusted Devices which use AppleID handy as well so you can verify it is Ok to use AppleID on the new Mac (or even the old one for that matter).

Well, on 1st boot of a ew OS install, Migration Assistant is refered to as Setup Assistant, which is the best way to do it.

Using MA once setup is OK for the most part.