Your $50 WD external would not be a good fit with an M1 Mac mini or laptop as it is unlikely it would ever be bootable and therefore useless as a clone or backup in the event of the internal drive failure. You would need something like this or this. Your $50 WD could work as a TimeMachine drive but a 2 or 3 TB drive would be better.

If your internal drive should fail you would have to have a bootable external drive or your Mac would be useless for anything other than a paperweight or perhaps a hot dish coaster for the dining room table.

As far as the VGA adaptor goes there is this or this made by Apple that plug directly into one of the Type C Thunderbolt ports on either the Mac, the hub, or the dock.

For your CF card reader there is this or this that would plug into any type A USB port.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein