This is the talking-sense that got to me. Thanks. It is why I made the post before pulling the trigger.
I really hate shopping and now I’m back to zero. I probably need to focus on an external graphics card solution, but that looks like a messy space to navigate too. There seems to be a good bit of negative feedback from the ASUS ROC external GPU laptop setup. I have no idea what is or is not possible. I think I saw a headline in passing about USB4 just getting merged into the kernel, so that doesn’t bode well for support of existing hardware. I’m not sure what kind of bandwidth is really needed for SD to the CPU.
Thanks again for the minor disappointment to avoid a major one later.