Sounds to me like a hardware problem for the two of you. My MBP is running Catalina and I can count on one hand the number of times it has crashed since I bought it 3 years ago (obviously not running Catalina back then).

Oh, and one of the times it crashed I distinctly recall setting it on the table too roughly and hearing a ping sound emanate from the closed laptop. When I opened the lid I saw the kernel panic screen. I'm chalking that one up to shock. It's been completely fine since though.

It doesn't make it any better. The MacBook Pro came straight out of the box after purchase and during the set up, I foolishly decided to upgrade to Catalina. The reduction in kernel panic with subsequent minor releases of Catalina suggests that part of the kernel crashes are software related. If the remaining crashes are caused by hardware problems, I am thoroughly disappointed in Apple's hardware quality. This is my first MacBook. My company only bought it because they do not want me to run a Linux laptop, as they can't secure it. Too be honest, it is has been a poor user experience so far.

Have you taken it in for service? If it’s still under warranty then they’ll fix it for you at no cost. Every company has the occasional defective product.

I’ve been using Macs since 1996 and have not experienced regular kernel panics on any of them since the early 2000s when I started using Mac OS X Public Beta. Your experience is frustrating but it’s the exception, not the norm. The fact that you can find other people, on forums like HN, who have also experienced problems is indicative of the selection bias of the Internet, nothing more.

This is not normal. And I don't recommend accepting this behavior. To expedite service, I suggest two steps:

Run the built-in hardware test, extended version. If it finds any fault, take it straight in for service. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201257

If AHT shows no errors, clean install macOS. As in, wipe it totally, and reinstall. This is tedious but I expect Apple support will recommend it anyway. And if you've already done it, it might save time.

Apple's hardware test reports no issues for me.

What kind of shock? It's not like they have spinning disks anymore.

Wipe the drive, clean install macOS. Tedious but suck it up, it might fix the problem. But at least it will likely skip a step when sending it for warranty support. I don't recommend hesitating, it's not normal.

That’s interesting, with both of these operating systems, I have to remind myself every couple of months to reboot just to be on the safe side, since the actual machines never crash or force me to. When you say your MacBook is crashing, what does that actually mean? I recently realized my Emacs had 300 buffers in it going back many many weeks, and I decided to finally reboot the whole machine and just get back to a blank slate.