Re: Apple should step forward
APFS is a pretty goood filesystem for SSDs, but Apple do not want you to use imaging. That's official, it's not supported. Something to do with hardware-level encryption using the T2 chip. You can pull and restore a disk image off a non-T2 equipped APFS disk very easily if you know how to use dd, or are prepared to push the right clicky things in Disk Utility. One APFS volume can be cloned to another with 3 clicks.
But once you get a machine with a T2 chip all that becomes history.