I can't imagine OpenCL in any way being involved with the rendering of the UI. Maybe you're confusing it with OpenGL?
If you're having problems making use of an eGPU (that's supported by apple, which rules out nvidia!), you should report that. eGPUs will probably be a common use case.
That probably has something to do with Apple's abysmal support for OpenGL. They have even deprecated it for their proprietary Metal API. From Blender's perspective supporting a proprietary API is not worth it.
Edit: I didn't test the RC yet. So maybe the performance is better now. Also, I never tried on a smaller display. It might work just fine on a 1920x1280 screen.