It's strange to me that there's no file system with basic features like journaling and support for files larger than a couple of GB, that is supported across all major desktop OSes (MacOS, Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD). All platforms support the same i/o standards like USB or DisplayPort, why did filesystems never make the cut to become a cross-system standard?

Imagine if you could have a backup drive (with reasonable modern data protections) that you could just plug into different systems and save all your files to. Isn't it odd that such a simple thing isn't possible? I guess network attached storage has gotten pretty accessible at this point so there's no need for it?

I think the basic problem is that FAT is generally "good enough," and in the increasingly common case where it isn't exFAT is close to universal and addresses the only problem that consumers frequently run into (file size limit).

While FAT/exFAT leave the possibility of a variety of different types of filesystem inconsistency, these seem to be fairly rare in actual practice, probably in good part due to Windows disabling writecaching on devices it thinks are portable. This kind of special handling of external devices is sort of distasteful, and leads to some real downsides on Windows (e.g. LDM handling USB devices weird), but using a newer file system doesn't really eliminate that problem - NTFS and Ext* external devices require special handling on mounting to avoid the problems that come from file permissions traveling from machine to machine, for example.

I don’t know if it’s just because I’m largely on Mac and Apple’s drivers suck, but I have run into lots of data corruption issues with exFAT on large drives (1TB+). More than enough for me to stop using it.

(Now I use NTFS and Tuxera’s commercial Mac driver, because I don’t know how else to have a cross-platform filesystem without a stupidly-low file-size limit.)

UDF is natively supported on all major OS.

I haven't used it in macOS but on paper macOS seems to be having even better support for it than Linux so you can give it a shot.

Lastly, you can use https://github.com/JElchison/format-udf for creating most compatible filesystem across different devices.