You can use Rufus to install 10/11 on a usb SATA/NVMe drive enclosure as “Windows To Go”.

In practice it works out pretty decently in my experience using it with windows 10 daily for a while, with a few caveats:

1. You need a stable usb connection

2. You need a usb drive enclosure with a controller chip that is stable/doesn’t overheat

3. Your drive should be powerless resistant. Unfortunately there’s no resource I know of that evaluates power loss handing. Some drives will have a bad time having power suddenly cut. I’ve had good experience with Intel enterprise sata SSD’s and NVMe drives in a Dockcase with capacitor. If your drive stops showing up, a power cycle might help: https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/

4. Have automatic backups setup.

Very useful for performance testing and hardware firmware updates that are windows only.

When switching between computers, I’ll often have to boot, windows gets confused and then reboot. After that it works.

However, I have no experience trying to make use of WinBTRFS or the separate bootloader project, which is apparently currently broken since a few months ago.

Ventoy booting a windows VHD file might also be a decent option

Does windows to go give you the same benefits of doing it on vhdx files (you can do snapshots and roll back state easily)

I've got a testing install of Windows on my main hard drive that boots from VHDX for these reasons

WindowsToGo is just normal windows on a hard drive, just one that’s usb connected.

Not in its own. You also need a different boot loader. The author has an implementation called Quibble [0] that also supports btrfs.

[0] https://github.com/maharmstone/quibble