I was in your position recently and decided to install PVE from scratch and restore VMs from backup.

I had a fairly complex PVE config so it took some additional work to get everything up and running. But it was absolutely worth it.

Same. It works great.

I replaced the drives, installed the newest version of PVE, then restored all of my VMs from local USB backup. I had to reconfigure a number of things such as HDD pass through and other network settings, but in the end the migration was a success.