I think that's mostly FUD. It's just one tool that's reporting those reads, and the reality is that with modern storage hardware, the numbers they report can be very misleading because of additional layers between the OS and physical drive.

In practice, I can't imagine the SSD load to be particularly worse than what the iPhones endure, and I have yet to hear anyone complain about their iPhone dying from their flash storage being overused.

No it's not FUD and I can absolutely prove this to you. Just open Activity Monitor -> Disk and then watch disk writes. Then check how SMART report changes and you'll see it's exactly match what MacOS itself reports.

MacOS is heavily rely on swap at least on M1 hardware for absolutely no reason.

Why are people downvoting this without saying anything?

It's definitely not FUD, but it's probably a bug. I'm surprised at how many people are in complete denial that this could be happening and are assuming that people aren't understanding the tooling or something, instead of the obvious explanation, that it's actually an issue.

I was just looking at Disk tab of Activity Monitor, and the numbers just don't make any sense, unless Mac apps are all throwing gobs of bits at the disk for no particular reason.

For example, in two days of uptime it says the SafariBookmarksSyncAgent has written 1.94 GB to disk. I haven't added any bookmarks to my machine in those two days and I haven't used Reading List, so how is that even possible?

As other's have stated, it's possible that SafariBookmarksSyncAgent has a process that regularly writes to memory (object creation and garbage collection) and that memory is being paged to disk.

A bug? Why isn't that possible? You seem to have excluded the possibility of a bug despite having evidence that one exists.

I don't think ChrisLTD is excluding the possibility of a bug - he is just asking how it's possible that a process has written so much to disk.

Yes, thank you.