macOS just refuses to mount my USB 3 drives. I have a 1T seagate ssd and a 3T WD hdd (both exFat) and it just flat out refuses to see them.
I have to re-boot to actually use the extension. I reboot, and it throws the enable extension warning again. Fucking infuriating.
However today was the last straw as a task that should have taken me maybe 15 minutes took two hours of fighting with macOS.
I used to love macOS. It felt so intuitive and while it was never flawless, it mostly just got the fuck out of my way so I could do the things I wanted and needed to do
Although I do agree that macOS has seen better days the things you describe look a lot like general hardware failure because macOS still doesn’t get in the way, at least not as much as Windows, and gets the job done.
Before you say that it all now runs fine under Linux so no hardware issues, consider that Linux is way more permissive with hardware failure than macOS is, you better have a look at dmesg while connecting / using the drives to see if there’s something potentially wrong there. Same goes for a log of the system boot.