Folder Icons Reverting to Document Icons

2020 M1 MacBook Air, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, MacOS 12.7.3 (Monterey)

I use my MB Air both as a laptop and as a desktop.

On my desk I have a dock which connects to external disks and a monitor. On my desktop I keep aliases to regularly visited folders, some are on the local SSD and some are on an external SSD. Every once in a while the icons on the external SSD change from the standard folder icon to that of a document.

The alias still works properly and sometimes after I close it’s window the icon has switched back to the folder icon. More often I have to click on the icon and open Get Info to force the icon to revert back. Sometimes It’s just one of the external folder icons, sometimes it’s more than one and sometimes it’s all of them. This is not a serious problem, just a minor annoyance.

I’m assuming this is caused by the OS being unable to access the external SSD when not connected to the dock. Is this normal behavior for Mac OS or is there something I can do to keep this from happening?