I understand with brand new machines it's a problem, but buying less-than battle tested hardware/software has always been problematic. If you already have substantial hardware, you probably shouldn't be buying a brand new machine and expecting it to just work after a major OS upgrade.
And I've been burned enough times by OS upgrades that I know to be cautious. I'm not saying the situation is good, just that it's a shitshow everywhere. I got around a dozen emails from my device and software vendors telling me not to use Catalina, so I'm not yearning to go out and buy a new Mac to run my software on and connect my hardware to it. I'll shit on Macs for that, but under the hood, CoreAudio is much more impressive than anything on Windows or Linux.
New MBP 16". Apparently it's a problem with the T2 security chip and affects almost all external USB 2.0/3.0 audio devices. Just do a google search for audio drop outs and T2. All digital audio goes through the T2 chip which seems to add latency and these drop outs. I think the only solution at the moment is to use a USB-C native device (but I haven't tested this). If you already have substantial hardware like I do, Catalina is basically unusable (and no fix in sight from Apple...).