Pretty much the same boat. Early 2020 I was spending so much time on calls headphones were just tiring. So it started as "get a microphone + speaker setup that doesn't echo" and just kind of spiraled into a half decade of incremental improvements.

Don't know that I've had anything as loud as a fire truck, but more than a few times I've had a 75lb dog a few feet away from me barking like mad, whining at me, playing by throwing a cow femur up in the air and letting it crash down on the vinyl floor, etc and apologized about the noise only to have people look at me funny and tell me they didn't hear anything but that explains why I seemed like I was having trouble speaking.

I think the only time I had anyone say anything about anything was when I accidentally had an air conditioner blowing directly on my microphone. They couldn't hear it, but my voice was coming through a little less crisp than usual as the noise cancellation was trying to remove the constant, high volume white noise.

Don't know what OS you're on, but on Linux I can definitely recommend Easy Effects (https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.wwmm.easyeffects). Been using RNNoise + Speex along with some other filtering for quite a while now to great effect.

One thing I found worked _really_ well if you're already using an external microphone of some sort--using the webcam microphone as part of a noise gate. On top of the filtering and existing gating, my audio only opens if my webcam _also_ picks up sound of sufficient volume. Lets me keep the microphone in front of my face fairly sensitive while still entirely eliminating echo and most off-axis sounds.