Guaranteed if I dual booted Linux on it the problem would magically disappear.

unfortunately not since its a hardware limitation
probably a cruft from the iPhone/iPad era since the first ARM desktop chips from Apple are basically beefed up phone chips which don’t need more than one external monitor

anyway it is pretty stupid to ship a laptop with that limitation in this century

for anyone afraid of the upfront cost: you don’t need to buy so many expensive hard disk drives to self host a media server like Jellyfin/Plex
RAID arrays add complexity and get expensive very fast while not being a proper backup solution at all, it’s nice to have but not required

on a budget buying a large hard disk drive (12~16 TB is a good sweet spot right now) and later down the road another one as periodic backup solution might be the wiser choice while accumulating your collection of media