mac external hard drive time machine partition

I clicked that randomly to see if it would tell me anything about my drive, and after loading for some time, it displayed a bunch of info (I didn't pay attention to what it said specifically) and incredibly, my time machine was mounted! This will sound crazy, but in disk utility, after clicking on the greyed out time machine drive, to the right of the 'mount' and 'first aid' buttons, there is an 'i' information button. I googled a bunch and had read many similar topics where data repair was required and various other steps, but I couldn't risk formatting or running anything on my time machine drive because it has all my work on it. It was showing up as greyed out in disk utility, and clicking 'mount' did nothing, and clicking 'first aid' returned the exact same results as you described above. When I got home and tried to run 'restore from time machine', I encountered the issue where the time machine external drive was not mounted. I had my machine returned from Apple after getting it fixed for a separate issue (new display) and had asked for a fresh osx install as well. It's just that Disk Utility isn't letting me reformat. How can I reformat the drive? If I can't recover the contents, then I'm fine with reformatting. The post said it only worked for ExFAT drives, but I still tried it. In Terminal right after attempting to mount using Disk Utility. I also tried searching the error code 49218, and Apple Developer forums told me to input So seeing as the drive is 'corrupted,' I tried to reformat it using Disk Utility. So I tried running First Aid on it, and it still returns an error:

Plugged it in directly to the TB3 port using the appropriate cable, and still nothing. When I plugged it into my MacBook Pro (2019, 13', 2 TB3, macOS 12.5) via a USB-C Hub today, the TM partition did not show up.

Yesterday, I was able to perform a TM backup but stopped it at 'Cleaning up (or something along those lines).' Ejected and removed it after. I've had a 1TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim for more than a year now, and it's been partitioned 3/4 as an ExFAT drive and 1/4 as an APFS Time Machine drive. Unable to mount and erase Time Machine partition on external drive Hello.

Mac external hard drive time machine partition