Dogcow-Moof wrote:
If the ports were "faulty," using adapters would not work.
Unfortunately that is not entirely true with regards to USB-C ports. You can have a half bad USB-C port. Rotating the USB-C connector 180 degrees upside down can sometimes make a device work. I have personally experienced this on the USB-C Macs I repair both with chargers and data connections.
Unfortunately the issues with external hard drives/SSDs are very complicated due to the multiple brands, models, file systems, etc. Plus there may be other differences between Intel & M1 Macs. We also need to keep in mind that last year many users also complained about having issues with many external drives. Most of the reports last year were with M1 Macs, but there were also a fair number of reports with issues on Intel Macs after upgrading to Big Sur. Unfortunately the issue last year was never really investigated by any of the tech sites (I'm not sure it was even properly reported) and I never did see any articles that ever mentioned the issue being fixed. I did see some references last year from certain hardware vendors that did mention some USB drives having chipset compatibility issues (JMicron) with M1 Macs, but those references were later removed (either the vendors provided an alternate product that was compatible or perhaps a firmware/software update was issued either by the vendor or Apple).
There may not be any one correct answer or solution to these USB drive issues. It certainly does not help that Apple loves their secrets so much that Apple may never acknowledge any problems and may never even mention a fix in any of the macOS patches/updates notes.