With the Local releases since then we’ve been seeing more problems with older MacOS versions and as such may soon raise our minimum requirement to MacOS 12 or newer. You can still utilize older Local releases as you have been until you’re able to update your OS, otherwise with a newer release you could try lower the PHP version to 8.0 or lower to see if that helps.
That being said, you mentioned having problems for “years” which would predate some of these changes so there could still be some underlying conflict at play.
When you run into this error have you done anything like restart Local, restart your machine, uninstall/reinstall, etc? Or have you tried manually checking MySQL?
Are you running other developer applications simultaneously? Apps like MAMP, XAMPP, or Docker for example.
I found the problem can normally be fixed when i restart my machine and then click local and wait 1 minute before i start site. If i click the link to the local site URL before its started and then try and start, thats when i get the error.