Why is my MacBook Air not recognizing USB devices?

I purchased an m3 MacBook Air in December and consistently run into issues where my external hard drive will vanish, usually I am able to see it in disk utility and the external ssd shows up when I plug it into my iPad. But for some reason this time the disk is not showing up in disk utility or when i plug it into my iPad. When I go into system settings I can see that it’s plugged in but something strange that began happening after the most recent macOS update is that any usb device I plug in (directly or with a hub) is not recognized by the MacBook. I owned a 13 inch m1 MacBook Pro for years and it never had any problems but since I purchased this MacBook it’s been doing this constantly which then causes me to lose everything on the external drive. For the first time since I switched to apple’s ecosystem in 2015 I’m actually considering my options because this is so irritating. It’s preventing me from working and causing me to lose important data that I can never get back. I’ve contacted apple and I’ve read every article, watched every YouTube video which in turn caused me to try every single troubleshooting technique that I’ve read about. It’s not the external drive nor is it every single usb device I’ve tried, it’s not the wires, it’s not something that can be fixed by rebooting or switching ports so please don’t recommend the same things that I’ve tried numerous times. Please help me because I’m a very loyal apple customer and if this doesn’t get resolved I don’t see any other options aside from switching to a different ecosystem… which sucks because nothing out there has the same beautiful features like apples continuity. I really really hope we can get this fixed because after 5 months I’m about at my wits end. I don’t have time to constantly deal with this… 5 months is way too long to have the same issue and no resolve.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]