Neither above answer addressed why the OP’s laptop generated the “drive not ejected properly” error message during normal usage, which may have been unrelated to the disk physical connection. Disk ejection message perhaps being the precipitating factor to drive failure, i.e. message appears, then OP disconnects the drive, which action causes the damage. Instead, look for the reason that the error message was generated in the first place.
Apple Support discussions include several threads, some dating back some years (!) and some recent ones, noting this error message behavior, with supposed causes including sloppy physical USBC port design, to poor cable design, to unaddressed behavior of the operating system. The threads date back to the High Sierra OS 10.11 update and continue to the present (Mojave 10.14), and there is no confirmed fix, as far as I can tell.