Yeah there were certainly tradeoffs. It's much harder to use separate displays now, though - last time I tried, I could address the two displays individually ("

Yeah there were certainly tradeoffs. It's much harder to use separate displays now, though - last time I tried, I could address the two displays individually (":0.0" and ":0.1") if I launched X on its own, but something (maybe the display manager?) was merging them into a single virtual display (":0") as soon as I tried to use an actual desktop environment. (This was was Mint 20, MATE edition, a few years ago - I gave up and reverted to a single-monitor setup at that point.)