Anything beyond AC has been 2*2. There were some odd ducks with AC that had 3*3 and some desktop options that were 4*4 but, since Intel was for the most part the only game in town for AX/E they only went 2*2. Even the desktop option used the same M2 cards from Intel which limited the options to boost speeds. MTK/RTL have a couple of options years into the move beyond AC but they typically suck in terms of performance / compatibility.
I updated from AX200 > AX210 > AX411 > NCM965. Each one offered better speeds and the AX411 allowed for connecting to both 2.4/5 for a combined 1.7gbps in terms of real world speeds. The NCM is a BE card though but, being somewhat cheap I'm still weighing the option of a BE AP or configure the second NCM as an AP in my setup using hostapd. I used to run an internal setup with AC but, with Intel cards it doesn't work so well as an option so I got an external AP instead.
The issue with updating parts of the network though is you need to do it from end to end or at least internally for LAN speeds to take advantage of the upgrades. It doesn't help though to have high bandwidth if the data source can't keep up though either. You have to size the bandwidth to the data you expect. When I was running spinners I could get 400MB/s out of them which meant my baseline would need to be 5gbps on the network side to saturate the transfers. I could through Ethernet and more recently I upgraded the spinners to a NVME drive instead which hits 6.5GB/s. The drive now would mean upgrading to 100gbps if I was really trying to keep pace but, there's no option for 100gbps on a laptop but, I can use TB and get 20gbps out of it using a $20 cable between the machines.