Working for hours ... two Macs, two different browsers, three different arduino boards - -Due, Nano 33 ble rev2, and an ESP board. All have worked in the past, but there have been LOTS of driver issues. Now, absolutely nothing works, the modemxxxx driver shows up, sometimes, and it disappears as soon as try uploading. I have looked in /dev/cu.* and the driver list matches exactly what the IDE shows. Tried different cables and different ports. The IDE CAN update the boot code. This used to work. Tried the cloud IDE and got exactly the same issue.
Do you use a USB-C to USB-A cable, or a hub?
I have no idea, mostly because I'm not a Mac user.
What the Due and Nano33 BLE have in common is the way uploads work. For boards with native USB the IDE sends a software reset (open and close the serial port with a baudrate of 1200 baud) to invoke the boot loader. That is why your port disappears and is replaced by another one. In Windows the port will e.g. change from COM3 to COM4, in Linux it will stay the same port (e.g. ttyACM0).
I suspect that your ESP also uses native USB and therefore has the same symptoms as the Due and the Nano33 BLE.
It might be useful for others (who are knowledgeable about Macs) to know which Macs you have and which version of the OS.