Yeah, I do most of my work inside VNC servers running fvwm with emacs, xterm+tmux+zsh, and firefox. My config files haven't substantially changed in 25 years. The desktop login environment has changed many times over this period (enlightenment, sawfish, compiz, metacity, mutter, mutter-on-wayland, even Windows 7 and 10 for work) but I only configure that enough to set up virtual desktops in which I just bring up VNC viewers for multiple hosts.
That's the secret. I've been running Windows 10 on the desktop for almost the last decade, but ran Linux for more than a decade prior to that. If I want a Linux desktop, I know I can pull out my old archived FVWM configs and be set.
That's why you leave around your config files from the '90s, you don't touch them and they still work!
Sent from a FreeBSD machine running fvwm ...