In theory, USB could be avoided with DIY JBOD:

  - Thunderbolt to NVME M.2 enclosure
  - M.2 to SATA breakout

Or:

  - Thunderbolt to NVME M.2 enclosure
  - M.2 to PCIe slot
  - LSI HBA PCIe card to SATA

What I do is I keep using the same (Samsung T7) external drive I lost the data on, but now I use it only to transfer data from one computer's internal drive to another computer's.

these types of enclosures are going to be using UAS, USB attached SCSI, which is relatively new. It should deliver a more reliable and manageable experience for external drive enclosures in general (e.g. proper addressing of which drive you want to talk to). If nothing else it's a different code path though.

I've been using a multi-drive UAS enclosure over USB3 as the storage for a VMS for some time, it feels a little weird given USB's history but it has been very reliable and easily saturates the drives from a bandwidth perspective. I'll probably go the same route for bulk storage in the future, since it's a lot easier to get small machines with USB than small machines with 4+ SATA channels.

Which UAS enclosure are you using? Would you recommend it? Any quirks to know about?

I use https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/s352bu313r

The internal RAID is neat and I used it for a while, but lately I've had it configured as a JBOD and I let the VMS manage which drive it puts things on. But probably the best thing to do would be to configure it as JBOD (it has DIP switches to choose the mode) and use it with whatever software volume manager you prefer, lvm or btrfs or whatever.