I want to use a product thumbnail completely different than the product image

There’s several ways you can do it. My suggestion would be to create a custom meta box that either accepts a either the image url or you pass the id of the image you want to use. Then within the template you can use the wp_get_attachement_image($args) function.

https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/metadata/custom-meta-boxes/
https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/wp_get_attachment_image/