There was no solution for me as my mac just totally stopped charging. I had to send it to an Apple authorized service center for diagnostics and it seems my charging port became faulty, and as for my other mac the entire motherboard is broken. Both of my macs are to be repaired. Not sure if Apple is well aware of this issue as it seems their update triggers hardware issues on the machine. Where is the best place to raise this apart from here, does anybody know?

You should take it to Apple or an authorized service center (whichever is available in your location). Both my Macs got major hardware issues that had to be repaired – motherboard on m2 and charging port on m1. They didn't get fixed even with factory reset, although you can always try that on your machine or if you have a backup or Time Machine then you should just downgrade.