Kc 12 to 23 - user credential

Hi,

we have been using a kc 12 installation (single node) and want to upgrade to 23.
unfortunately there is no kc.sh in 12 still it is still wildfly (at least i could not find it).
trying a direct upgrade from 12 to 23 on a test machine led to tons of constraint errors when updating the db (postgres).
so I dropped all tables in the keycloak schema from the test machine and started over.

exporting the realm from kc gui in 12 and importing it in 23 worked, unfortunately this does not export users.
so my next idea was to extract users from kc 12 using the api following something like this:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65200310/export-users-and-roles-from-keycloak/65200689#65200689
unfortunately when trying to import this file in kc 23 I am getting the following error:

2024-04-17 16:01:33,732 ERROR [org.keycloak.quarkus.runtime.cli.ExecutionExceptionHandler] (main) Error details:: java.lang.RuntimeException: com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.exc.UnrecognizedPropertyException: Unrecognized field "username" (class org.keycloak.representations.idm.RealmRepresentation), not marked as ignorable (139 known 
properties: "userFederationMappers", "rememberMe", "duplicateEmailsAllowed", 
"adminEventsDetailsEnabled", "users", "clientOfflineSessionMaxLifespan", 
"webAuthnPolicyRequireResidentKey", "webAuthnPolicyPasswordlessAvoidSameAuthenticatorRegister", "components", "otpPolicyType", "accessCodeLifespanUserAction", "id", 
"webAuthnPolicyAttestationConveyancePreference", "enabledEventTypes", "applications", 
"webAuthnPolicyPasswordlessSignatureAlgorithms", "eventsListeners", 
"ssoSessionMaxLifespanRememberMe", "defaultDefaultClientScopes", 
"webAuthnPolicyPasswordlessCreateTimeout", "clientOfflineSessionIdleTimeout", "notBefore", 
"publicKey", "smtpServer", "clientPolicies", "resetPasswordAllowed", 
"webAuthnPolicyAvoidSameAuthenticatorRegister", "accessTokenLifespanForImplicitFlow", 
"webAuthnPolicyPasswordlessUserVerificationRequirement", "clientScopes", 
"internationalizationEnabled", "defaultRole", "accessTokenLifespan", "passwordCredentialGrantAllowed", 
"federatedUsers", "applicationScopeMappings" [truncated]])

So now, I am a little bit lost. Could someone please advice me on how to properly export at least users from kc 12 and import them to kc 23?
Best regards and thanks in advance,
Otto