time machine is worthless

I have been having problems with Time Machine backing up my M1 Macbook Pro to an external SSD ever since I upgraded to Sonoma months ago. Zero issue backing up prior to Sonoma. Never more than 20 minutes to complete an incremental backup. Now, for 3 months and counting, ridiculous backup times. I called Apple support on 1/11/24 and said "walk me through how to set up my external SSD as a new external drive, and I am willing to erase previous backups". Following their explicit instructions, I started a new backup and 4 hours later after showing an estimated backup time of 6 hours remaining, I got the message "waiting to complete 1st backup". I called Apple support again, asked for an escalation, received a Senior support rep who checked my backup settings and then proceeded to tell me to restart the backup again. At 3 hours and counting, the backup showed 2 hours remaining. After waiting for 2 more hours, I checked the Time Machine backup status again. Here is what I received " waiting to complete 1st backup". It never finished. The backup just completely failed. During the first backup problems that I encountered back in September, I ran backup logs - twice - based on explicit instructions from Apple technical support - supposedly at the request of the Engineering team at Apple. Never received a reply. Apple knows extremely well that there is a major Time Machine issue within Sonoma. There are only 2 possible explanations IMO: 1. Apple knows there is a problem and can't fix it, or 2. Apple Support is incompetent. Harsh words indeed, but Apple has earned it.