Thanks for the great answer. Several follow up questions.

1. I have 1 1080p monitor and 1 60k 4k monitor. Is it the total data I have to worry about or the data hogging screen? I'm tempted to not use the 4k on the work laptop and not worry about it.

2. I sometimes see reference to Adaptive display port and it doesn't seem my laptop supports it. Is that something I should be paying attention to?

3. Is something like one of these a workable option? They all say thunderbolt 3 but often paired with USB -c - so I am confused on what it is using. Also is the HDMI a limiting factor I should be aware of?

https://www.amazon.com/VAVA-Docking-Station-Ethernet-Charging/dp/B086DS5Q6K/ref=mp_s_a_1_11?dchild=1&keywords=thunderbolt+3+dock&qid=1614027150&sprefix=thun&sr=8-11

https://www.amazon.com/Thunderbolt-Certified-Nekteck-Supports-Delivery/dp/B0749CFGVB/ref=mp_s_a_1_16?dchild=1&keywords=thunderbolt+3+dock&qid=1614027150&sprefix=thun&sr=8-16

https://www.amazon.com/CalDigit-USB-C-Gen2-10Gb-SOHO/dp/B08FF3BDW5/ref=mp_s_a_1_36?dchild=1&keywords=thunderbolt+3+dock&qid=1614027436&sprefix=thun&sr=8-36

Thanks again for the great help. I already have a better understanding of this.

UPDATE:

I finally bought a dock substantially identical to the https://www.amazon.com/VAVA-Docking-Station-Ethernet-Charging/dp/B086DS5Q6K and upgraded (thanks to a tip from /u/phurley97) the laptop to the beta bios with USB4 support. Achieved nearly all my objectives.

I was wrong about my monitor being 4K, it's 3440x1440 and the dock delivers native resolution via USB-C at 100Hz. Use an HDMI cable from the dock to the main monitor's HDMI input.

The dock I actually bought is this one: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QSZZL83 at about $80 -- quite a bit cheaper because everyone's just rebranding Chinese stuff anyway and putting their own logos on it etc.. Comes with a pretty big 96w power brick and delivers enough power to the laptop to run pretty well. Just enough USB ports for the different peripherals I wanted (external keyboard, touchpad, etc.) and fast Ethernet.

If I really need to get 144GHz refresh rate and/or ideal graphics performance from the GPU I can resort to a direct HDMI connection to the appropriate port. Day to day, as someone who doesn't game much, this all works fine.

I'd recommend this as a reasonably priced solution that's probably more than adequate for most users-- but do upgrade the BIOS, there was some flakiness on display detection that went away when I did.