The hardest part to wrap your head around is the fact that the interior quite literally does not exist from your perspective, nor will it ever. From our perspective outside of a black hole, everything that has ever fallen into a black hole is not actually inside it yet, it is actually squashed up against the surface impossibly thin, asymptotically approaching the radius we observe as the event horizon. Due to time dilation, there is in fact no black hole yet; just a collapsing star paused in time approaching infinitely close to the moment where its mass is contained within its Schwarzschild radius. We can’t observe these objects squished up against that boundary because the light they emit gets red shifted into infinity, but that’s where they are and will remain forever.

But from the perspective of an object falling in, nothing special happens at the event horizon. It observes the flow of time to be as normal, and it simply becomes causally disconnected from the entire rest of the universe as it enters a space that does not exist for us.

I’m not exactly sure how black hole evaporation works into this, though. Just when you think you got something about physics understood, you realize you actually don’t.