Can you disable and / or schedule iPhone synching with Sonoma?

I have a MacBook Air (1) running Sonoma 14.0. I have approximately 80GB of music, which is far too much to keep on my laptop at all times, so I store it on a 2TB external SSD. (1) Because my music is stored on an external drive, if my external drive is not connected and the AMPDevicesAgent process starts attempting to synch my iPhone (3), the AMPDevicesAgent process goes crazy and starts consuming memory and CPU cycles (according to Activity Monitor). This is very frustrating because it makes the fan crank up like mad, slows down everything else, and is generally really annoying.

Has anyone discovered a way to prevent the AMPDevicesAgent process from synching automatically? Is there a way to limit or schedule the synchronization based on whether my external SSD is connected? (4)

(1) 2018 13" 512GB / 16GB

(2) It's a little problematic because it means I need to always make sure my external SSD is connected before opening the Music (formerly iTunes) desktop app, otherwise Music thinks all of my music is missing and things get wonky.

(3) iPhone 15 Pro 512GB

(4) I cannot keep my external SSD connected at all times because (a) sometimes I take my laptop to a coffee shop and don't bring my external SSD with me and (b) I only have two USB-C ports on my laptop and sometimes need to use them for other reasons. I also cannot simply disable my phone from synching via WiFi because (a) it requires a USB-C port and I only have two and (b) the whole point of synching via WiFi is that it's supposed to be easier than using cables.