In general I’ve had good success with Time Machine. I, too, have lost TM volumes. I just erased them and started again. Annoying to be sure but 99.99% of the time don’t need a years worth of backups.
The author mentioned copying the Time Machine drive. I have never been able to successfully do that. Last time I tried I quit after 3 days. As I understand it, only Finder can copy a Time Machine drive. Terrible experience.
That said, I’d rather cope with TM. It’s saved me more than it’s hurt me, and even an idiot like me can get it to work.
I did have my machine just complain about one of my partitions being irreparable, but it mounted read only so I was able to copy it, and am currently copying it back.
I don’t know if this is random bit rot, or if something is going wrong with the drive. That would be Bad, it’s a 3TB spinning drive. Backed up with BackBlaze (knock on wood), but I’d rather not have to go through the recovery process if I could avoid it.
Problem is I don’t know how to prevent it. It’s been suggested that SSDs are potentially less susceptible to bit rot, so maybe switching to one of those is a wise plan. But I don’t know.