Really stuck, tbh, as i'm not sure if I should just fix it or forget it and leave the macbook world.
Seems rather unlikely to be true.
This would make sense, if you set up remote code execution for apple servers, but I could not imagine something horrible like that.
The server is the the apple server the update process talks to to figure out what to download (and then to download it).
(I haven’t looked at it but there are probably multiple mac processes, with their own set of relationships, and multiple Apple services involved, but for the purpose of this issue, you can think of the client side being anything running on your mac, and server side as anything running on an Apple server.)
Their solution was to push an app to App Store which was called "iOS updater" or something. Installing and launching it would allow you install iOS update from Settings app.
I think they will do the same with Mac
What conditions are these?
But even without the MDM taking action, the client can enter this state as long as it's enrolled in the MDM. My guess is there a background download/check that happens at an unspecified interval.
//HACK ALERT: Fix Big Sur update problem
if ProductVersion = "11.1" &&
RequestedProductVersion = "11.0.1" {
RequestedProductVersion = "11.1"
}