How to stop Music arbitrarily resetting folder location of media library

I've housed my Apple Music library on an external drive for at least ten years. During this time, I've had very few issues with this set-up. Certainly, I'm not the only one on the planet who needs to house their music files externally.

Over the last couple of months, Music has, without warning, reset the media folder location to its default location. After this happens, any music I add is copied to this location on my local drive, separated from my external file location without my knowing.

Over the past month, this has now happened twice. After spending hours trying to get the music, which had been rated and organized into playlists, consolidated with the files on the external drive, I've concluded that the easiest way to resolve this is to (after repointing the music media folder location to the external drive), delete the imported albums from the library, then start from scratch and import them again. This means losing all the work of rating the songs and moving them into appropriate playlists. I did try copying the albums manually onto the external drive, then go into song info and change the file location. However, Music no longer asks if I would like it to use the same location to resolve the other missing songs of the album. This means I have to manually go into the info of each of hundreds of songs to select the updated folder location. No thanks.

I get, that if Music loses connection with the external HD for whatever reason, it needs to compensate in some way. But why does it change the media folder location in the background without notifying the user? This is utterly infuriating. Music should, AT A MINIMUM, notify the user that it has changed the media folder location. Ideally, it should ASK the user what it should do.

But, I'm not entirely sure if this is what is causing my issue. I've had no other problems with connection with my external drive.

This is an extremely shoddy UX experience. I now have 13 albums that have had their songs rated and organized into playlists that I will now have to remove and reimport. Thanks to this ridiculous UX bug, this is hours of work out the window.

If anyone knows a way to prevent Music from automatically resetting the media folder location, I would appreciate it