Hasn't happened to me. I'm running 3 external monitors when my MacBook is docked at home, 2 when I'm at the office.

Not once the order was not correct when reconnecting.

I'll second this. I work between home and two different offices, each with it's own monitor configuration. The offices each have the same model of monitor, but I configure them to be on different sides of the laptop itself. This has worked flawlessly for years, including with Catalina.

> MacOS decides to rearrange them arbitrarily after reconnecting them

Not had that problem personally in at least 3 MacOS major releases. What version of MacOS are you using?

A lot of monitors, especially cheaper ones, don't have the serial number fields populated in the EDID, so that the OS can't distinguish between them.

I encounter a bunch of cheap monitors, still not had that issue recently. But that doesn’t disprove your point, just my own personal experience.

High Sierra 10.13.6

I've found I got this to work reliably when I connected the same monitor to the same port every time. I'm not sure how well other OSes handle this though.

My MacBook even remembers the meeting room projector on a client I visit like 4 times a year and sets everything like it was before.