I've done this enough, but don't stop there as it's likely to happen again. When I resort to such a solution, I take a look at the syslogs. More often than not, something there will tell me why a simple restart of a service, module, whatever was the answer.

I had a similar problem as the article with a standard USB 3 enclosure. Two PCs, identical OS (oS Tumbleweed), same kernel version even. modprobe -r then modprobe usbstorage and it worked. An obscure error in the logs pointed to the uas module which for some reason failed to reload, enabling the enclosure to work.

Oddly, the other PC on which it worked was loading uas.

Exactly. My tendency is to jump in and try to root cause problems but nowadays the most productive solution is almost always some kind of a restart.

I always refer to this as Computer Science 101.