Hot-plugging Thunderbolt devices is hardly an edge-case on Macs, it's a heavily advertised feature.

I had about weekly kernel panics or machine freezes (would not wake from sleep) while unplugging my Thunderbolt dock (with displays and lots of devices) all throughout the USB-C Intel Mac era, but they all went away when I got an M1 Pro machine, so I wonder how much is down to OS design vs drivers vs hardware (vs how specific hardware influences driver design).

M1 machines don’t have bridgeOS at all, right?

If it can panic apparently they do have it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BridgeOS says it runs the Touch Bar.

The M1 lacks the T-series coprocessor altogether and all its functions are inside the main SoC. Whether that means that bridgeOS still runs on non-architectural cores inside the SoC, or its responsibilities have been rolled into macOS, I have no idea. I do know that only my T2-having MacBook suffers from these panics.

Raises the question whether or not anyone writing this kind of software actually uses it.