I think part of the problem is rose-colored glasses. macOS definitely has bugs today. The question is, is it actually any worse than it was 12 years ago (in what was probably the Mac's heyday in terms of attention from Apple)? I'm not sure it is.

It's interesting you say 12 years ago -- 12 years ago was Leopard which according to Apple, contained over 300 changes / enhancements.

That is similar to Catalina with its too many new untested features.

Then they fixed the bugs in Snow Leopard.

The severity of Catalina's bugs are much greater than Snow Leopard. For example, there is now simultaneously a Mail deletion bug and iCloud bug to ruin your data across all machines.

Catalina needs a Snow Catalina.

Mid-2014 Macbook Pro user reporting in.

This Macbook Pro has an actual keyboard, magsafe power port, continues to function great, works great with external monitors (HDMI port). Other than feeling squeezed for RAM and that the CPU isn't the fastest anymore, it was well worth the purchase price.

I have a 2012 MacBook Pro (same design as yours) and agree with you. I think it's probably the best laptop design Apple ever shipped. My work laptop is one of the new ones, and I don't particularly mind the USB-C ports, but the keyboard and the touch bar are pretty bad.

As an early-2013 MacBook Pro user, I concur. I bought the one-notch-below-top-of-the-line model, and it has been well worth the price.

Since then the hardware has gotten worse, and with MacOS Catalina, the software is worse as well (the removal of 32-bit support affects my workflow; I can't use MacOS Catalina).

The sad thing is, nothing else has really gotten better. I'm leaning toward side-grading to Linux, but there's risk involved in buying a full-spec machine for Linux and perhaps finding it doesn't do everything I need it to do.

Anecdata point #2: I've had minimal problems with my 2 TB/USBC->HDMI connectors (esp with Mojave), across 2017, 2018 and 2019 MBP 15". Perhaps your cable isn't the best?