Mobile multi-headed workstation?

I have a 3 screen high powered workstation at home with multiple VMs through VFIO, a large ZFS pool and SSD caching for my primary performance reliant datasets, it's perfect for my needs, but by nature pretty much welds me to my desk, so I also have a laptop and have set it up to constantly replicate over my ZFS datasets to the laptop, idea being at any time I should be able to just pick it up and go if I am mobile and be able to continue exactly from where I left off on the desktop, I can run the exact same VM image I use for my work within that workstation on the laptop so transition is fairly seamless.

My laptop however is now getting a bit long in the tooth (Intel Haswell + Nvidia GTX980M 2 x 2tb 2.5 " SATA + 1x 256gb SSD configured as ZFS cache) and two primary problems with its functionality getting multiple screens is since I use linux and the nvidia driver, my displaylink external USB monitor refuses to work.

Fixing the laptop I guess it would probably still be performant enough to be usable if I were to upgrade the SSD and split it so part of it is used to hold the linux OS partition etc and the rest of it can still be used for ZFS cache, but I think running the OS from rotational media is what's primarily making it so extremely slow at the moment, but might also be some other problem as it runs at 100% fan usage even while idle, so maybe thermal limits are also throttling down the fairly ancient haswell chip inside?

Anyway, maybe that's just a lost cause, in which case the question arises about what to buy to outright replace it. The obvious move is just a Ryzen 5800h or better chip with a decently beefy video card, but on this front I'll be stuck in two ways; still no real good solution to the three monitor problem because displaylink drivers don't work with proprietary nvidia drivers, and it seems pretty much all modern notebooks don't have 2x 2.5" sata drive slots anymore, so I'll be stuck on storage availability for my ZFS datasets too. Are modern external portable monitors still bound by this problem or are there practical non-displaylink alternatives that work well these days?

I don't suppose anyone has come across this problem themselves and formulated a clever way to solve it?

Would be awesome if VR headsets were mature enough that they could do a virtual 3 monitor workstation, and I see with stuff like VR desktop that appears to be a theoretical possibility... but last time I tried it in 2016 was impractical at best.

and the idea of using a windows closed source program like VR desktop + assumedly an oculus quest 2 just for plain old access to a workspace strikes me as a large privacy compromise, but maybe that's being paranoid? I would definitely not want to be running windows on the metal for the system any way you look at it, only potentially as a VFIO VM.

My use case is primarily financial analysis (think lots and lots of windows across large workspace areas), software development including tensorflow so GPU reliant, systems administration, and a side of the occasional gaming when I have time but this part is not important enough to compromise on the objectives of the other functions.