I run a heavily modded game on an rtx 2060, and the only crashes I have are VRAM related, and your experience sounds similar to my crashes. Crowd density, texture quality (main menu setting only), and dlss settings are the major factors for whether I crash on load or not.
I also recall that ray tracing shadows or reflections helped with VRAM, but the FPS hit wasn’t worth it to me.
Depending on your setup, and if you’re mod savvy, you might be interested in the FSR3 Frame Gen mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/14726. Short version is that it replaces DLSSG with FSR3 and allows frame generation to be used with a ton of GPUs that can’t normally use it. Makes UI elements feel choppier, but the overall performance increase is nuts (helps CPU and GPU bottlenecks). Without it, I can’t reasonably play above low crowd density, and with it, I can play on high density pretty easily.
I moved to towers for the same reason years ago, but I basically never do major component swaps like I thought I would.
I’ve since realized that having a tower is really nice for other things though, namely maintenance and cleaning/airflow. My rtx 2060 seemed like it was on its way out a year ago (thermal throttling, even on way lower settings than it used to be able to run just fine), so I took it apart and replaced the thermal paste. Runs better than when I first got it. Got some new case fans recently as well and the whole thing runs cooler, quieter, and they use less power than my stock ones, which is nice.
Obviously the thermal paste thing applies to laptops as well, but laptops can be very tough to get open and dig around in.