Aperture will launch on an M2 Air running Ventura 13.6.3 and will browse an old Aperture Library - but nothing else

This was a bit of a shock. Aperture won't run on Intel Monterey without an OS hack (Retroactive). I was cleaning up an M1 Air that had a copy of Aperture on it and on a whim I clicked it. Aperture was there via Migration Assistant. No Retroactive needed.

Aperture launched. No complaints. I could browse my old 600GB Library.

So I copied just the app from my Application folder to an external drive and then launched it on a different M2 Air. Same. Just launched. I could browse and search. Much faster than on my old Air running Mojave.

I have not tried doing anything with it other than search and browse. I'm basically stunned and I figure it could mess up my old Library.

I'm still healing from my years long slog to migrate the Library to Photos.app/iCloud. Being able to browse the old Library is very helpful for understanding what migrated and what didn't. (Yes, Photos.app is mostly a huge regression.)

See also: I shared this on Apple Discussions. I'm curious if Apple will remove the post; they are pretty aggressive about removing posts these days.

Update 3/28/2024: I recently got an older M1 which I updated to Sonoma. Aperture launches and quits on this machine. So now I need to test on an M2 running Sonoma.

Update 3/30/2024: And ... it crashes on an M2 running Sonoma. So this is only a weird curiosity and not very useful.