Since then a great many have come up with actually ergonomic keyboards and they virtually all have something in common: modifiers easily reached with the thumbs while the hands are in their home position.
No crazy "moving the entire left hand to not hit ctrl with the pinky". That's not ergonomic. At all.
If the layout is QWERTY, left hand on asdf, right and on jkl; and the thumbs on modifiers/spacebar.
Hitting modifiers do not require hand movement and do not require stretching the finger underneath your other fingers.
If anyone's serious about this, consider an actual ergonomic keyboard (Ergodox, Keyboardio, Kinesis, etc.).
I picked Japanese keyboards --even though I don't speak japanese-- for several reasons: they're ubiquitous, they can be had with Topre switches (I much prefer Topre than Cherry), the spacebar is tiny so I don't need to distort my thumbs to reach the modifiers, they have lots of modifiers (due to the various input methods japanese has) and, well, the killer...
Laptops with japanese keyboards are a thing.
Laptops with, say, a Keyboardio keyboard: not so much a thing (unless you carry your keyboard and your laptop of course).
I remap the entire keyboard to be basically QWERTY with Hyper and Super in addition to Ctrl/Alt/Meta/Shift. Super is dedicated only* to the window manager and nothing else. Modifier+ijkl sends the actual arrows key code. Works in every single app.
Life is good.