Disk backup vs. disk cloning: which is better?

Basically, I sat on my laptop by accident and trashed it—it still runs, but barely, and it’s got all my work and the register software on it.
A few years back, my old laptop was acting up with a dying drive. I used Acronis to make a backup—mostly just cloned everything over to a new card—and kept using the laptop without any issues.
I just picked up a new laptop; both run Windows and they're both Dell Inspirons.
Now I need to move the drive from the busted laptop into the new one so everything stays exactly as is—no messing around with settings or other headaches. Or maybe just a backup.
The Windows backup wouldn't load, and the Acronis backup/recovery didn't quite do what I wanted it to.
Anything specific I should watch out for?

So you cloned the drive, and now what? It won't boot into Windows? Which version of Windows are we even talking about here?

Windows 10
Managed to pull the data onto an external drive via cloning—so that part’s done. Now I’m trying to move it over to the new laptop, but Akronis won't even see the new drive when I boot from it.
Trying it over USB is painfully slow, and honestly, that's not really what I'm aiming for here.
I'm wondering if it'll actually boot the system if I just swap the drive from the broken laptop straight into the new one.

Have you already cloned it and managed to get the same OS running on a new laptop just using a USB port? If that worked, then I guess swapping the drive physically would work too.

Swapped the drive over, but BIOS isn't picking it up at all.
Makes zero sense—both SSDs are M.2 NVMe, and I'm jumping from a newer Dell Inspiron to an older laptop.

Basically, Acronis just lagged on reporting this. The only thing was that the new laptop had to be running Windows already.

If you ask me, the absolute best software out there for disk cloning is Acronis Cyber Protect. I actually managed to successfully clone an entire drive using it, even though the disk was struggling with a few bad sectors.