I honestly find it very hard to believe Russia would knowingly fire on NATO forces if they did something like give Ukraine long range weapons that can hit Russia or move naval forces into the Black Sea.

Acting like they would takes the agency away from Russia. If they are prepared to fire on NATO ships legally transiting to conduct trade in the Black Sea or attack NATO territory in retaliation for us giving Ukraine missiles as we're allowed to, again, to conduct trade, then they were never interested in not causing WW3 in the first place. You can say "but what about the threat of nuclear war" well Russia's been dangling the threat of nuclear war over everything - sanctioning Putin? Act of war. Giving Ukraine artillery? Act of war. Seizing Russian assets? Act of war. Finland and Sweden applying to join NATO? They threatened nuclear war but did nothing.

At the end of the day, unless the west attacks Russia directly first (which it obviously will not and shouldn't do), Russia would have to choose to attack NATO. Doing so would be madness and it seems inconceivable that they would. We need to stop giving credit to these Russian claims that they'd be 'forced' to attack if we escalated legal, non-combative measures against them like escalating weapon transfers to Ukraine or trying to open up the international waters of the Black Sea. Again, as I've said before, they could have decided to escalate by shooting down the planes during the Berlin airlift, but they didn't, because that'd require making the decision to attack Anglo-American forces, and they didn't want to do that.