Ventura 13.3 is putting Mini to sleep even though settings are set to not sleep

So after a lot of back and forth with Apple Support, I've come to the conclusion that there is something wrong with 13.3 on my 2023 Mac Mini w/ M2 Pro.

Disk Not Ejected Properly notification continues to occur in all of the following scenarios.

• After updating to 13.3.
• After going to Safe Mode on the updated version of 13.3.
• After reinstalling the system software to 13.3.
• After going to Safe Mode on the "clean" reinstalled version of 13.3.

This did not start until this past week. Essentially, 13.3 has made my Mac Mini unusable for the things that utilize the external drives.

I'm going to hopefully downgrade to 13.2 using a Time Machine back up and go from there. ---- And that didn't happen, since it wipes the drive completely and I can't/don't trust the Time Machine backups from this past week so hopefully Apple Engineering will figure this out soon.

Actually in the past, there have been issues with sleep ejecting disks.

https://www.lacie.com/support/kb/disk-not-ejected-properly-on-mac/

Regardless, this issue has only started in the past week since updating to 13.3. So obviously something has changed since no one is yanking the drives' cables out of the back of the Mini. The possibility of the computer going to sleep makes sense. Do you happen to know where there might be a log entry either proving or disproving the sleep hypothesis?

Yeah, this is definitely an OS related issue. For me, it happens:

Consistently when:

• External Time Machine drive unmounts during Time Machine Backup when it is the only attached drive.
• External Time Machine and any other attached drives unmount during a Time Machine Backup.

Randomly when:

• External drive with Photos Library unmounts when importing photos or working in Photos. Photos crashes.
• External drive with Lightroom Library unmounts when working in Lightroom. Lightroom crashes.

Time Machine drive is an Apple SSD drive from old MacBook Pro in an OWC enclosure.

Photos and Lightroom drives are Samsung T5 and T7 drives.

Fourth drive is a Crucial drive in an expansion enclosure.

I have sent two data capture packages for Apple engineers to review. Let's see what happens.

And just to be perfectly clear this never happened prior to the 13.3 update.

Okay I have no idea what is going on.

Tonight is the first night since the update I have specifically worked on my own crap but wtf every time I come back to my Mini I'm presented with BS.. Something had to have changed between 13.2 and 13.3 to put me in this state. I am not getting "Disk Not Ejected Properly" even when I'm fully signed into the club's system. This says something is wrong with the OS update.

Do you have portable drives attached to your iMac Pro? Would love to hear if it happens.

Came back to the Mac this morning with over 150 notifications. Seems like it is just getting worse and now I'm getting the notifications while working on the computer. They eject and remount so it isn't related to sleep as I originally thought.

Walked away from computer an hour ago. Saw that the screen saver kicked in.

Returned just now to find these two lovely notifications. Something is off.