My apologies! I'm incredibly frustrated, non-native, and I typed it on my phone, so it became a bit of an incoherent rant. I cannot edit the post anymore, so hereby a reworked version. I hope it is clearer now. :)
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Last year I experienced similar problems to the ones described in this thread, on a MacBook Pro 15” Retina 2014 running Mojave. I spent over six months trying to fix the issue via Amac, the Apple Genius Bar, other authorised repair shops, calling with Apple technical support—constantly travelling back and forth without any luck. Every time they followed the basic steps (SMC reset, reinstall of macOS, factory reset, etc), but nothing worked and the problems started occurring more and more often.
At some point the independent, authorised repair store thought it was a graphics card problem, after telling them that sometimes the screen froze and went "snowy" after closing the lid and opening it back up again. However, when trying to find the underlying issue by overloading the GPU, the problem never occurred. They sent me away, again and again, telling me my MacBook was working fine and was "surprisingly fast" for its age, even while running heavy rendering programmes.
They finally believed me after it froze in the store itself, but they still didn't manage to find any issues. Meanwhile, the crashes occurred more and more often. I actually thought myself that the issue started occurring after a Mojave update, but they convinced me that this could not be true, so I never tried to go back to a previous macOS version (which I now thoroughly regret).
In the end, I was about to graduate, so I needed a fully functioning laptop. Both Apple and the independent store told me to either take a gamble by replacing the logic board, or to buy a new laptop. I didn't want to take the gamble, because it was crystal clear that it wasn’t a hardware or a software issue, and Apple didn't offer any solution or compromise. I ended up buying a new MacBook (15") in August 2019.
At the beginning of this week, a similar issue started. With my previous MacBook it usually froze or turned black and the fans would make a lot of noise for a longer period of time, forcing me to shut it down forcefully. With the new one, it completely freezes, shuts down quickly, the fans work hard for about half a second and then it automatically restarts.
The freeze+crash has happened twice so far (within a week), again seemingly at random moments: once I clicked on a Google Search, the second time I tried to adjust the display brightness via the touch bar.
I am currently still using Mojave 10.14.6, and reading all this I'm quite wary of updating it to Catalina.
I still have warranty, thank god, but I cannot believe I’m going through this again.
Ideally I would get a replacement laptop rather than going through this insane and fruitless procedure again (or worse, ending up with replacement parts, having the MacBook work for a while, but finding the problem reoccurring while having lost warranty). But I fear that I'll have to travel back and forth again with this same issue for a while. Last time it took me 2 months to finally convince them there was an actual problem to begin with, so advice how to deal with this would be greatly appreciated. Or if you recommend updating to Catalina after all, maybe I will try that first.
Btw I live in Europe. Thanks in advance!
