I occasionally have a similar problem happen with my SD cards. My suggestion is to try plugging your drive into a different USB port, or if that’s not possible, restart your PC and then try plugging it in again. If that doesn’t work, try it in a different PC. If you do get it to work, copy all the data from it and then do a full format before dropping all the data back into it.
And no, I’ve been using USB for years. I NEVER use the eject hardware safely and I’ve never have had any data lost as a result. All eject hardware safely does anyway is make sure that you’re not actively writing anything to the drive, but if you are, it’s not like it cancels anything, so if something hangs, you end up having to unplug it without using the safe eject anyway.