USB Hard drive has very small chance of being recognized by Macbook Pro each time it is connected, but works with other machines
I had the same issue with a WD Elements 2.5" 2TB disk on my retian macbook with macOS High Sierra.

My assumption is that the disk "fell" off the USB bus and macOS instead of gracefully retrying is just giving up.

In my case the disk worked for an hour or two, but then I got the error that I should eject Disks before unplugging them and the errors in the dmesg.

I guess this is a combination of macOS being not very forgiving and the WD on-disk USB controllers being a little wonky.

I was using a USB3 hub between the macbook and the disk, so maybe that was the source of wonkyness.

I have no ZFS drivers installed.