Disk Utility Cannot Repair a Disk Formatted APFS

I've encountered what I consider a rather troubling error in macOS 12.2 Monterey: In Disk Utility, if a user tries to perform a "first aid" command as a bit of preventive maintenance on their drive, if that drive is formatted APFS, then the output of the process is an error message implying that the drive is irreparable and should be replaced. The exact message text is, "First Aid process has failed. If possible back up the data on this volume. Click Done to continue." In my case, this message incited me to buy a pricey new SSD drive to replace an aging Western Digital drive I was using for critical backups. It wasn't until later that I learned that there was nothing wrong with my old hard drive at all, but rather Apple's software. Yet I could find nothing in the Apple Communities about this, so I'm writing it up myself.

The message resulting from a drive repair of an APFS drive should be changed to something more appropriate such as "Disk Utility's first aid process is incompatible with the APFS file system" or whatever the exact issue is.