My advice to anyone doing motherboard shopping is to read the manual off the manufacture's site before deciding. The pcie lane tradeoffs tend to be in the block diagram next to the contents page.
Like, what are you actually connecting your desktop to?
The only reason laptops depend on Thunderbolt is because they have limited internal expansion and need high performance external I/O.
If you need more things than gaming boards offer then obviously you have very advanced needs and can go pay for a workstation board, something like an sTR5 socket Threadripper board.