Yeah that’s basically what I did too.
I just installed dash to dock and made the icons quite large, then rebound a button on my air-mouse to the super key (to bring up the dash). I also installed Just Perfection and used it to hide the top bar unless the dash is open.
90% of the time, I’m just using Firefox, so I don’t need anything too fancy.
It’s been years since I had to deal with MATLAB licenses, since basically everything in scientific computing/data science uses Python these days!