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After much troubleshooting, I finally found the solution. It turns out that it wasn't only the Thunderbolt port that was not working, the HDMI port was not working either. I immediately thought there was a graphics driver issue because of this, and there was.

I ran the following command to view the drivers I had. I was initially confused because I was certain that I installed the Nvidia drivers correctly.

sudo lshw -c display

Turns out that the VGA compatible controller was "UNCLAIMED." There are two "graphics cards" on the system: the discrete Nvidia GTX 3050 and the integrated Intel Iris graphics. In Windows, it switches between the two, using the Nvidia card for graphically intense processes and the weaker Iris one to save battery life for normal operation. This unfortunately confuses the Linux Operating System.

Solution: you need to install TWO graphics card drivers for the Inspiron 16 Plus 7610 Laptop: the Nvidia driver AND one that supports the Intel integrated graphics. Normally, the integrated graphics drivers are installed automatically by Linux. However, the graphics adapter in this computer is not supported natively by the 5.0 Linux Kernel, it needs an additional install. Use the following command to install it and then reboot the system:

sudo apt install linux-generic-hwe-20.04-edge