I like your solution. However, I took it a little further by getting two machines and connecting them together via the Thunderbolt USB ports. I can access my files at native speed with the cable plugged in, or in go-slow mode over wifi or in super-slow mode over the internet, with my wifi router configured accordingly.

There was nothing online about how to do this. I just had to plug the Thunderbolt 4 cable in and it worked perfectly. No instructions needed, it configured itself and I was instantly in a new world of network file speeds.

I use Barrier KVM too.

That is really interesting. Have you noticed a performance penalty at all? E.g. with large concurrent IO like compiling, or other dev use cases?

eSATA never seemed to take off for that application, and on paper usb-c should be pretty good!