Working with Vertical Headers

I know they're a bit 'old-hat', but I working on a site that needs a lot of vertical space, and it's probably back in the 90's when I last used a vertical header, so a bit of nostalgia isn't so bad!

I'm trying to make my workflow as normal as possible, so I set my <main> element to have a left margin the same width as the header, hoping that from then on, any elements I add will automatically be shifted right and things like percentages etc will all work. But some things aren't so good, some elements look better aligned centre across the full page including the header, others need to be centred in the page excluding the header.

What advice would you give for a setup like this? Is it a candidate for container queries/units?
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