They had it solved once, didn't they? IIRC, the Macintoshes of yore lacked eject buttons for things like floppy disks and CDs, and used software mechanisms to prevent premature removal.
Huh, I never really thought about that. It kind of just felt like 'An Apple Thing (TM)'. But yeah that mechanical lock controlled by software does solve that issue, well until the hardware or software fails.
Less interoperability leads to more lock-in in their view. Poor implementations facilitate this. Making the user lose data or be uncertain about losing data is just icing on the cake.
Shameless self promotion - if you plug your notebook computer into external disks often and don’t enjoy finding them to eject every time you undock, DriveLight[0] gives you a global shortcut to eject (or just unmount) all your disks at once. You get a menu bar extra to show disk activity, too!
0 - https://ttkb.co/soft/drivelight/
No one "ejects" an external hard disc, you remove or disconnect it. You do eject a CD or a DVD.
Eject is a forceful removal ... if my memory is not totally shagged - iacto (Latin - I throw) or similar.
To be fair I have seen a few ejections or the aftermath of discs (hard/floppy/CD/DVD) and not considered them ... a disconnect event 8)
I suggest Apple go back to school and dispense with the lazy error reporting.