OK, I've only skimmed through this thread, but I don't think anyone has mentioned the opensource utility 'ddrescue'. If you manage to locate someone skilled enough to work on your problem odds are that ddrescue is going to be the tool they reach for first - it's purpose built for situations like yours, where the disk is actively in a state of degrading.
What ddrescue does is first try to read everything it can from the failing drive to a new hard drive, getting those parts of the data that are still able to be read without error. Then it goes back and works on the failing sectors of the hard drive, reading them repeatedly and by approaching from both sides of the track to try and find some way to get the missing data. I've used it very successfully on an obviously failing hard drive, and I was able to recover the data from the entire drive; this was back in the days of HFS+, so your mileage under APFS may be somewhat different.
Here is a decent write-up on ddrescue, which might be enough for you to follow along with. You should know up front that you're going to need a drive that is guaranteed to be large enough, since what ddrescue essentially does is try to replicate the source drive onto the target drive, sector by sector. The risk is that simply buying a second 8TB drive might not be enough - not all 8TB drives have EXACTLY the same number of sectors, and you could find yourself three or four sectors short. A better plan would be to buy a 10TB drive, and know that you won't run into that particular problem.
Here's how to install ddrescue on your Mac. It's a free command line utility for recovering files from failing drives.
www.macobserver.com
Good luck, and I hope that you recover your data and set up a backup strategy that has more redundancy. If you have a Mac Pro, as I do, I personally recommend the ZFS file system:
Cheers,
Kurt