MIgration Assistant failures (3)

I am moving from a 2020 Macbook Air to a brand new 2025 Macbook Air using Migration Assistant. Both are using the newest operating system. I have done the full process three times now. Once it failed and forced me to cancel out, but both of the other times (once laptop to laptop over the network and once from Time Machine) it moved through (took over 12 hours), completed, restarted, took me through the new laptop set up and both times nothing had transferred onto the new machine, except for things from my icloud account. Nothing from the transfer was there, no files, applications, anything. I double check the storage use just to be sure.

No idea what to do next except a manual piece by piece transfer, which would not be ideal. Anyone else had this issue? My very techie partner did the last one with me, and it still failed. (He is a pc guy and doesn't know what to try next either.)