New Mac has difficulty reading ExFat formatted external drives

I have several external drives that I formatted ExFAT on my 2020 MacBook Air, running the latest version of Ventura. The drives were formatted on this drive under the OS that immediately preceded Ventura. But the slightest hiccup (often something I can't even identify) creates problems with the external drives. Either the drives cannot be read at all, or one or more folders on the drive either cannot be read or cannot be deleted. Disk Utility cannot fix these problems.

The only solution I've found thus far has been to reformat these drives (on the PC, since the Mac is unable) and reload them. But that's very time-consuming, especially with a 1 TB external.

My old PC, running Windows 7, can read these drives just fine and very quickly. It is also often, but not always, able to fix the drive problems to make the drives at least readable on the Mac.

I previously had a MacBook Pro and had the same problems with it. So it appears to me to be an Apple issue.

I've had Macs for about 10 years now and am very happy with them with this one exception of ExFAT formatted externals. I'm afraid that if I format the drives in a Mac format that I'll completely lose them if a problem occurs since the PC cannot read the Mac formats.

Any suggestions for how to deal with this problem other than what I've already tried?