I remember the "good ol days" when I would always opt for a FireWire audio interface for music production and live performance over USB for exactly this reason. I'd get way better latency and stability.
Even now an ancient FW400 HDD enclosure of mine is less flaky than a lot of USB storage I’ve used.
Any ideas what im I supposed to do with the firewire mixer i bought 14 years ago?
Get a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 dongle and a Thunderbolt 2 to Firewire dongle?
You can still use it! I keep an old ThinkPad X61 & T400 around with mini-Firewire ports on my MOTU 828 mkII interface. It is also a DAC over SPDIF for my much newer Ryzen desktop. I would like to try Thunderbolt to FW800 to FW400 adapters to see if I can get it working on something more modern, as I learned it has mainline Linux kernel support.