Issues with new Macs: Hardware makes them difficult for me to use. What options might be available in the future? At home and at work I have a MacBook Pro (2015) which is the last one before the following hardware changes :


Butterfly keyboard.
Overly large trackpad that causes palm-clicks.
Touchbar.


Each of those alone is a significant issue for me:


The existing MacBook is already not a good keyboard for me: I do need the tactile aspect of keys with 'travel'.  My typos on a MBPro keyboard are already much higher than on an external keyboard
I do work on the move so an external keyboard only is an option a fraction of the time. 
I rest my palms on the laptop so the large trackpad will induce yet more typos
My fingers look for the specific function keys: the Touchbar does not work
I do not use smart phones more than just for typing (precariously) because of the lack of physical keyboard . This is after years of trying; it is not working for me. That carries over to the mac and its Touchbar.


If I could buy a non-Apple / non-Mac there would be no issue. But I must use a Mac: all teams that I have worked on for five years only use Macs: and we must use IT supported configurations. Pure linux would work fine (for home) but in the (larger) companies it is not supported (security apps, wifi, productivity apps etc)

I am also constantly in trouble with memory usage due to running heavy and large application codebases along with VMs, browsers, and productivity apps. The maximum 16GB on the older Macs will eventually simply not be sufficient.

The IT folks do not use new Macs and use the old ones. All co-workers that have been around long enough use the old Macs and also refuse to upgrade. So I have not run into anyone with solutions for this yet.

Does anyone have a plan for how to handle this?
Start a conversation with your IT department about using Linux (possibly alongside Macs, it doesn't have to be a replacement).  Don't just assume they can't/won't support it: go and actually put your case to them.  It sounds like you're not the only person in your company with these concerns.

(I know, this isn't likely to get a lot of votes on an Apple-centric site.  And I used to like my iMac a lot, but haven't tried the new machines that are bothering you.  But, given your constraints, I think this is the right answer to your question.)


  ...pure Linux would work fine (for home) but in the (larger) companies
  it is not supported (security apps, wifi, productivity apps etc)


Where do you get this idea from?  It simply isn't true: plenty of large companies have been using Linux for many years.