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Notes -
I’d encourage you to look up the term mos maiorum.
In so far as the mos maiorum required the Senate to confirm qualified SCOTUS appointments even if the President's party was in the minority, it was thrown out some time ago. Democrats think it was thrown out by Senate Republicans when they refused to hold a vote on Garland and then rush-confirmed Barrett, Republicans try to both-sides it going back to Bork. The Garland precedent is that the Senate can reject nominees based on pure partisanship in order to hold the seat open for their own party President. Since the Republicans paid no political price for it, it is the new mos maiorum.
I think the real issue is that Presidents of both parties have working increasingly hard to nominate partisan justices, that Bush v Gore made this a lot more salient, and that party discipline in the Senate has been getting stronger over time. The last nominee who was sufficiently less-partisan that an opposite-party Senate should have confirmed them was Roberts.
The other point is that strategic retirements mean that a vacancy coming up other than when the retiring justice's party controls the White House and Senate is a rare event. There were no vacancies with opposite-party control of the White House and Senate between 1991 (Souter and Thomas were confirmed by a Dem-majority Senate, but one with a conservative majority if you count Dixiecrats as conservatives) and Scalia's death in 2016.
Assuming regular alternation of the parties in office, and that incoming Presidents have strong enough coat-tails to control the Senate in the first half of their term, the default is that the partisan composition of SCOTUS is fixed. The Democrats obviously have an incentive to disrupt this.
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