Yeah displaylink depends on the use case. For my day to day work, scripting, spreadsheets etc. it’s fine. I can understand why some may not like them. They are great for lower end MacBooks because they can bypass the silly monitor limitations on the “slower” chips
At home I use an eGPU to drive 2 monitors and tv but that’s more to play games.
I THINK a thinkpad dock has 3 outputs. 2 DP and HDMI and is only limited by the horizontal resolution your laptop can output. A lot of intel onboard graphics are limited and if you are trying to output to a 4K+ 2x 1080p monitors you are gonna have trouble.