Interesting to see the correct advice here for hanging stuff from metal studs. So much of the advice on the internet about this suggests using toggle bolts, but it's actually fine to just use sheetmetal screws directly into sheetmetal studs. You can find datasheets online about how much weight each screw will hold into a given thickness of steel, but it's often surprisingly high -- more than 150lb for even fairly small screws into 25ga steel. For example:
Speaking from experience, using sheet metal screws in metal studs only works sometimes. A lot of the time the screw doesn't catch, and if you apply a horizontal pulling force, you can just pull the whole thing out. We had mounted some closet brackets to metal studs using sheet metal screws, and it held for a while. But eventually the brackets came out of the wall. We went back in with toggles and it's all good.
I haven't personally experienced what you describe, and I hope I don't! One thing that I have read is that you have be really careful about not making too large a pilot hole.
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