Why would you use takeout to download Google Drive contents when syncing to your local computer is its entire purpose?

Because the Google drive desktop app crashes as well :)

That is odd I can't remember it ever crashing on me.

I long ago used arq backup with google drive as a target, and there’s something like 1-10 million little chunk files in that directory so it’s probably that…

Google Drive files you can sync to local disk via the Windows or Mac app.

Fails!

Then your data is gone.