this is exactly what has been happening to me the past few years!
reading this thread is like reading my life story over the past 2-3 years!
So I am using osx 10.14, I’ve been reluctant to upgrade to 11 because I know I will lose some apps I use regularly, but does upgrading to osx 11 fix the crash issues for everyone?
I don’t know and would be curious to know, as well.
I did not upgrade to MacOS 11 yet myself, as I’m working on a long project and want to have it finished, before a big change.
But as I said, on my MacBook Pro with Catalina I have no corrupt files with Blender 3.1 alpha. Already happy with that. I did have issues with 2.93 before. (On my iMacPro with Mojave I can only use 2.82. All newer versions corrupt files.)
Well, soon we (Mac users) all have to upgrade to Monterey, anyway - so we can use the Mac Metal version of Blender! 
Without knowing your exact system and hardware, or the specifics of your particular workflow it’s difficult to diagnose what might be going on. I will say that for me Blender has been and continues to be one of the most stable software in MacOS that I have ever used.
Many of my software instability and crashes can be traced down to one single culprit – file and folder permissions. MacOS’s UNIX origins means that everything is “owned” by someone (ideally the main user), so when a software goes to write cache files somewhere it doesn’t have write permissions to, it crashes.
As I said, Blender for me is rock solid, but I also have a rock solid system – 64Gb of RAM, M.2 storage, 18-core CPU and a decent (but not great) GPU.
it an iMac 5k 3.6 8 core i9, with Raedon pro Vega 48 8GB
realised osx 11 is not available anymore and we are on osx 12 now, anyone tried this yet?
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That’s the same system as mine. I don’t know if it was a Blender update or macOS update–or both, but Blender stopped crashing all the time. If I opened a blend file created in an older version, then I’d have crashes. So then I’d use the append trick mentioned earlier in the thread. It’s still not as stable as 2.8, but crashes are rare now.
maybe you updated the os?
I’m running Blender in Monterey OS 12 and so far it’s been pretty stable for me.
I would also add that I feel one of the best things you can do for your system stability is to, at least once every couple of years, but even sooner; reformat and reinstall everything from scratch.
A friend of mine had been just doing updates for almost a decade and everything was running like crap. I insisted that he back everything up, and then reformat his computer and re-install everything from scratch. It made everything super stable!
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I am also using 10.14.5 and have never experienced these problems except once or twice with an alpha version.
I’ve migrated the same user profile from the first OSX across several machines up to 10.14.5 and never had a problem except for having to repair permissions a few times.
interesting, what spec is your machine?
MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014)
2.5 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2 GB
So Nvidia card, I know blender dropped AMD card support on osx on some point. Does anyone else with the crash problem have an AMD graphics card?
yeah, that is kind of interesting, My Macs both have AMD cards…and problems.
But, I would have no idea how a GPU could cause a file to be corrupt. As far as I know collections (or corrupt meshes inside them) were the cause of my issues.
Just to rule out one thing, does anyone with the crash issue use dropbox? I have often wondered if the issue was to do with saving to dropbox.
I was also saving to Dropbox. I can’t remember if I tested out saving locally instead to see if that cut down on crashes.
so that’s another avenue to explore, but that wouldn’t explain the broken collections issue I guess.
I never used dropbox. So I can rule that out from my side.
I once sent a corrupt project file, which I couldn’t open anymore, to the Blender devs.
They found at least one corrupt mesh in one of the collections. This was causing Blender to crash instantly, whenever the file was opened.