@botchedphoto - Hi, and welcome to the forums!
Good idea to check out the final project first. Software moves so fast.
Which project exactly did you try? Could you give me the link?
I tried out 42. Challenge Game Over - combined-target on both macOS and iOS (and a few others). I don’t have exactly the same hardware configuration as you, but I tried on a 2019 MacBook Pro and an M1. Neither of them failed.
The later projects don’t have Renderer.library = device.makeDefaultLibrary()! as an implicitly unwrapped optional (the ! on the end), not that that should make a difference.
I know that playground libraries have changed, but not the project based ones as far as I know.
(link to solution for playground, although that won’t help you here: Chapter 4 playgrounds not compiling Xcode 12.0.1 - #3 by caroline)