I’ve done something similar. Around 2017 I got Lenovo ThinkStation; this was a system that had “umph”… but was an older model close to not being sold anymore so was relatively cheap. I put some after-market upgrades in and that box continues to serve me very, very well. Right now I’m running dual Xeons with 10 physical cores each and 192GB RAM. Just like you describe, to not be limited when running VMs, concurrently running various workloads, or working well with largish data is something I’d have a hard time giving up at this point.
There are only really two issues with this buy big/hold long approach so far: vendors can put arbitrary constraints on you which can mess with your day. I do a lot of business type work and so I run with Windows 10 using WSL for most dev… but Windows 10 is effectively EOL and there is no upgrade path because my hardware is old enough not to support the correct TPM versions. Other equipment I want to use is made for compatibility with newer hardware and doesn’t mix well with my old workstation; I upgraded my monitor to a an ultrawide a year or so ago and it doesn’t want to work well with my older workstation (part of this is just their firmware isn’t any good, but still… )
I also use a laptop (Surface Book 3), but the workstation is my main axe.
(even after cleaning). Overall the computer was simply getting too slow, overheating, and I was usually running out of SSD space.
I own a bunch of Apple stuff. They almost lost me there for a bit but then backtracked on some of their truly horrid ideas: keywords with zero-travel 
, full-sized left/right arrow keys 
, touchbar 
, ditching magsafe 
(though my M1 Air does not have it, unfortunately).
