Is the version 2 IDE supposed to completely replace 1.8.x, or is it a thing that's supposed to be "available" for "advanced users"? Is it simple enough for complete beginners, or should they stick with 1.8 for now? (I'm especially thinking about all of the existing tutorials and less-formal documentation (eg forum posts) describing how to do things with the old IDE.)
(Personally, I've been holding off on the new IDE because it theoretically doesn't run on my version of MacOS. 
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Yes. The Arduino IDE 1.x codebase is now unmaintained. Additional work would only be done on it in the case of a serious emergency. For example, some releases were made to address concerns about the use of the vulnerable log4j. But in general all the development resources are being dedicated to work in Arduino IDE 2.x. Arduino IDE 1.x is still just as great as it ever was, and will always be available, but it will inevitably become increasingly more outdated relative to Arduino IDE 2.x over time.
It will probably be better for me to leave answering this subjective question to others since I'm surely a bit biased by now due to my involvement in the Arduino IDE 2.x project.
It is true that the Arduino IDE 2.x user interface is more complex compared to Arduino IDE 1.x, mostly due to the addition of new features such as the debugger and language server. I would like to think that it still achieves the goal of being approachable to beginners though, while also now being a bit more capable for the advanced users.
Even though the Arduino IDE 2.x UI was based on Arduino IDE 1.x, unfortunately there are some differences that make instructions developed for Arduino IDE 1.x not apply perfectly for users of Arduino IDE 2.x. I have been affected by this because I have had to make a lot of updates to my large Arduino support knowledge base.
In many cases, the differences are fairly small. For example, the baud rate menu is now in the upper right corner of Serial Monitor instead of the bottom right corner. I think many users will be able to interpret the instructions themselves, but I also know that for a beginner who is already very overwhelmed by the learning process, even minor inaccuracies in instructions can throw them off.
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The reason "Big Sur" is specified as the minimum macOS version for the Apple Silicon/ARM build of Arduino IDE 2.x is because that is the first version of macOS that supported the M1/M2 processors:
This specific minimum does not originate from the Arduino IDE 2.x codebase.
I should have been more exact. I'm running 10.13 on a Hackintosh. (The "hackintosh" part makes upgrading tricky and possibly risky. )
(the IDE for Intel 10.14 does seem to work, though. It starts up, anyway.)
I'm glad it is working on macOS 10.13. I believe the minimum version for the macOS Intel build was not based on some hard technical compatibility issue, but rather that this was the oldest version the team had verified the IDE will work correctly with.
There definitely are some hard technical limits when it comes to the significantly older versions of macOS. I think they are actually the same as the 10.10 minimum for Arduino IDE 1.x because they are imposed by the Go programming language version that was used to build both Arduino IDE 1.x's arduino-builder dependency and Arduino IDE 2.x's Arduino CLI (and other tools) dependency.
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