Hello, thank you for your comments, they are appreciated.

I have noticed that you have replied to many of the Blender questions.

I hope that they will update for Mac, and if you have any suggestions for resources about how to get some good results out of the standalone for a beginner, let me know.

Octane is not just an add on for Blender.
Octane has released it's own edition of the software, so that you can use Octane tools.
In order to get it working, you have to make sure the Octane edition is the one that is running.
If you are not running it, you don't see the add on in preferences.

Not ...

Basically putting out a call for advice, for anyone who is successfully running a Mac M1 gpu and Blender.

My server is crashing. If someone could even tell me that they had it working I would continue to bother. Otherwise, it just seems a lot easier
to use the native renderers, Cycles or Eevee ...