That’s the rabbit hole I was starting to go down. I’ve finally had some time to do more testing and the issue also occurs in windows and a live cd. So I’m assuming it’s a hardware issue, although the 5v rail on my PSU is reading right on 5v when unloaded. I’ll start replacing parts.
I had written half the post before I got the idea that the large SSDs were causing my smaller USBs to fail too. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case. Further testing indicates that my 128GB USB drive doesn’t work, but a 32 GB one with Ventoy does work.
It doesn’t appear to be a specific chipset as when the drives show up in gnome-disks I can see the chipset. The two that I just tested are Realtek and Phison.
You might like the book Determined by Robert Sapolsky. It’s very dense and I haven’t gotten far into it yet but it’s about the science of free will.