Windowserver/ Kernel crashes on 2020 iMac Sonoma 14.5

As bad luck would have it and after a long hiatus, last week I experienced a T2 initiated shutdown. I believe the random one-off crash is not extraordinary and so far that's all I've encountered this time much unlike my previous experiences which are much like you are still dealing with. I will add the rather frequent "freezing" necessitating a hard shutdown on my part which I have more recently experienced and previously noted is no longer occurring. It must be gremlins. Anyway, keeping it alive..

Hopefully you will enjoy more time between crashes/restarts than what you have been dealing with. I still get a very random T2 chip related crash but certainly not like I had been (I think I've had 2 since my last message on 7/20). However, the past couple of months I have also been experiencing infrequent frozen screen issues necessitating a hard reboot. I also have been experiencing inactive hyperlinks in Safari that is fixed by cycling the browser. Unrelated to our original issues? Who knows? Maybe the next OS iteration will correct this? But this is more wishful thinking than anything else. One day we will graduate to the latest M# chip and Apple can finally bury these gremlins they say don't exist.

The most likely cause is a hardware failure. There is a slight chance that it could be the external hard drive. But most likely, it is simply a logic board failure.