What about performance concerns? This sounds unbearably slow, especially for someone accustomed to an NVME SSD. Not sure why you would do that to yourself when cloud backups are an option.
As those are equivalent with 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes, exactly like the internal M.2 type M SSD slots, there is no performance difference.
Only the latest laptops with Tiger Lake, and the laptops with Ryzen 5xxx to be introduced soon, have PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots, so they will be able to have faster internal SSD's.
I expect that the interconnection standards for external devices will also continue to be improved, restoring parity with the internal devices.
Can you suggest some brands or models?
I have an NVME 2.0TB drive in a USB-C enclosure and while fast as an external this is not fast enough for booting and running the dozen or so apps I keep open on my MBP.
YMMV if you don’t act as a power user.
Keep in mind that USB-C != Thunderbolt 3. Yes, the latter also physically connects to a USB-C form port, but it's totally different. It's quite confusing and sad.
To address any conventional SSD vs NVMe SSDs performance gap maybe consider and external NVMe SSD!
PCIe costs you less than a microsecond of latency. A good SSD has 60 microseconds of latency. You're not going to notice any difference from moving the controller.
Many people still use HDDs for game storage.
This sounds like an ad, but Sandisk has USB 3.2 flash drive with NVMe inside, that according to this has up to 2 GB/s read speed: https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-Portable-External-SDS...
I used the version 1, not NVMe, which can only do half that speed, but I found it plenty fast.
Not that that means anything for performance. NVMe just means that it uses PCIe.
Since the external port is USB, the internal use of NVMe is actually a downside. The drive actually has two separate circuit boards inside. One of them takes up space and power just to convert NVMe to USB, and wouldn't exist in a better design.
https://i.imgur.com/6oPiOls.jpeg
https://static.tweaktown.com/content/9/2/9280_08_sandisk-ext...
(Alternatively, if you really can't switch job, just buy an ssd yourself)