MacOS Sonoma 14.2.1 Crash on Wakeup / Rendering / Gfx problems

Hi,

I am running a Macbook Air M1 updated to Sonoma (now 14.2.1).

I have recently started to run into massive problems. The only recent change I did was to update to Sonoma and I was using firefox all the time. The MacOS on my Mac was not able to correctly restart after being woken up from sleep (Just screen closed).

The main issue appeared 3 times so far:

First time

My MacOS was not able to correctly restart when woken up after sleep.

I open the display and the whole screen looks like a graphic error. The screen is flickering like crazy and the whole screen content is randomly cut up into blocks, a section of the screen flickered pink.

I tried opening and closing the display several time, to no avail. The I tried button mashing and touching the touchID sensor changed the problem from strong flickering, to pink parts, to static picture.

The buttons were still working (regulating display brightness, volume up down), but escape for some reason turned the screen black for some seconds. All of this looks like a hardware problem.

However, the mouse pointer (controlled via touchpad) was still working perfectly well and displayed without an issue and not being scrambled.

After some time and button mashing, the Mac went back to normal. Some parts of the menus still had pink blocks which disappeared by hovering the mouse over it. Now I am not sure anymore if this is hardware related.

Second time

When it happened the second time, there was nothing I could do to fix it. Screen flicker with occasional pink. I could only reboot the mac via longpress of the powerbutton and restarting it, which it did without an issue. The mac was running fine afterwards.

Third time

Again, after waking from sleep, the whole screen was flickering, this time no pink. The whole screen started to get chopped up in large blocks, mouse was still working.

Like the first time, the Mac got back to life once I did some weird button mashing (Touching the touch button and I guess something else as well). However, the program Firefox did not get back to normal, all letters in the tabs were scrambled and tab-independent the picture (in the window) was completely chopped up.

Restarting firefox fixed the issue.

After this, I did the most recent update to Sonoma 14.2.1 and updated firefox from 120 to 121, believing it is a firefox issue or one of the "solved problems" of the most recent MacOS update.

Now comes an additional weird part:

After I did the updates and restarted MacOS I encountered some really weird rendering issues in Finder right away. When marking files, they were not highlighted, only the text got slightly brighter. When scrolling in Finder, single files started to disappear, leaving blank lines in a long list of files. This got worse with scrolling, going up a folder and back made all files disappear.

It feels like a ransomware attack now (at least how I imagine it), but when I closed the finder window and opened a new one all files in the same folders were there again, highlighting working like normal.

I am baffled on what it is and what I can do.

Initially it looked like a graphics hardware issue (pink streaks etc), but the mouse was still displayed fine (?).

In the recent occurance, MacOS got back to normal, but the issue was remaining in Firefox (which was open on all occurances so far, the culprit?).

But then again, after updating, an (additional, related?, unrelated?) issue occured in Finder, with files starting to "disappear" and highlighting not working.

The only thing connecting all of this in my head is graphics rendering. And I have no idea on how to test for anything, least of all, fix it. But it's scaring me. What to do?!