MacBook Pro M3 Max intermittent USB 3.0 external drive mounting issues

I have a brand new Nov '23 MacBook Pro with the M3 Max chip, with the latest OS, that is causing issues with external hard drives that use USB 3.0.

I have 3 separate external drives, all USB 3.0, all different brands (Seagate, WD, etc.), and sometimes they connect to the Mac no problem, other times they don't appear in Disk Utility at all. When the latter occurs, I have to plug them into my old '13 MacBook Pro to have Disk Utility recognize them, and run First Aid there to repair (which frequently takes 10+ attempts to fix).

My impression is that there's an issue with Thunderbolt 4.0 ports and USB 3.0, which in the case of hard drives, completely borks the hard drives.

I'm likely going to have to invest in a USB hub to do the handoff, but jeeeeeez is this a bad issue if it is in fact Apple's Thunderbolt 4.0 ports actually causing damage to external hard drives using tech as recent as USB 3.0. I shouldn't have to upgrade my external drives in order to use them without causing damage to them.

From the consumer's perspective, the options are:

1. Break down and buy new hard drives ($$$)
2. Buy a USB hub to be the intermediary ($$$)
3. Have my workflow come to a standstill until I do one of the above because I have to spend ~30m repairing the drives repeatedly on an old Mac.

I should also mention they're not disconnecting (which the majority of Google search and forum results on this topic seem to be). This is what feels like a very serious issue, and one that's using fairly common modern tech.