Talking of rarely need, most 105-key boards have numeric pads that are dust covered. TKL layouts are the future and they have an additional fn modifier, maybe there's room here to add another purpose to it.
The real bind is fitting travel around family life that changed since 2020, kids going to different schools and spouse changing jobs means work life balance is shared differently for most people. I can see the issue going beyond pay, people can't be into places at once, but you can put the hours in when remote spread over the day.
If you're remote and move, then work requires you to change office location, in UK employment law I think they have to cover moving expenses. That could mean you get a moving allowance that you put into bricks. I'm not sure how it works but I'd hope that the building and land at kept at the same size.
Maybe, you can SSH to GNU Screen and attach where you were, perhaps from your phone to just read. You could do the same with rdesktop to something x11, but you'd need more than a 256MB VM for that. If you have this running 24x365 then you'd spend more energy/money.
For me it is the amount of ram it demands. Most of the day it is an IRC client, for a small portion it does voice/video. How does it need a gig of RAM all day? This squeezes my computer towards e-waste, and I'll be damned if I throw this computer away for an IRC client. Screw you MSFT, get it fixed.