If you have any familiarity with the 'underground collective who builds Mac clones using regular PC parts' - you may have heard of an app called Kext Wizard. It's used to do just exactly this sort of thing (properly install kexts & then rebuilds permissions).

Have been playing around with getting this to work this afternoon. I'm on a Mac Mini M2 PRO + Ventura 13.2. I wasn't able to make the installer work, unfortunately. So I used 'Suspicious Package' to extract the AppleFWAudio.kext file from the installer. I've dabbled for years in the Tonymacx86.com world, so I am somewhat used to doing this sort of thing. I first went into Recovery mode & set the Startup Security Utility > Security Policy... Allow user management of kernel extensions... as recommended. Next, did a manual install to /Library/Extensions. Finished up by using one of my old CustomMac tools, Kext Wizard to execute a "Repair Permissions" (disk permissions on the disk), followed by "Rebuild Cache" to rebuild system kext caches. Rebooted. Behold the System Report shows my Onyx-1220i audio mixer with integrated FW audio interface: ...but nothing shows up in the Sound System Settings option. I have another audio interface now that is my primary interface, but I could sure use the extra input channels with doing a bigger session & need more than 8 channels of input (other interface has 8 mic pre's). If anyone is following along who has gotten this to work on the M2, I'd love to hear from you! Thanks in advance!