After clicking on eject icon, can I remove external drive right away?

Brandnewuserid wrote:

With Windows computers, the user clicks on eject for an external drive, and then there is a pause before getting a notification that the drive can be safely removed.

There is really no need to do that on Windows as long as data isn't being transferred to the drive. Windows mounts removable drives with the write-ahead cache turned off. macOS mounts them with the write-ahead cache enabled. With the cache enabled, the drive could still be processing the cached data after the data activity light stops. If you disconnect a drive that is finishing transferring the write cache, it may power down and cause corruption.

Hence, on macOS, you must wait for the drive to disappear from your Mac before disconnecting.

When you select a mounted disk on the Desktop and right-click, selecting Eject "____", it may eject right away, after a short delay, or ignore the request because the drive may still be used by one or more processes. It may warn you in that event and the drive will not be ejected until process access ends, or you shut the Mac down. There is no notification that the drive can be safely ejected in macOS as either it honors the eject request or it doesn't.

Brandnewuserid wrote:

So I take your answer to be that as soon as the drive disappears from the Mac per Finder, I can instantly from there physically remove the drive without damaging anything.

Correct.