Quick take: I think it's really only your insistence on using laptops that forces most of this complexity on you.

Get a powerful desktop system. Run everything on one machine.

Yes, there are Rack patches that will eat even a Ryzen ThreadRipper, but for the most part a powerful, large multicore system these days will run everything you want on a single machine.

As far as synchronizing different applications, is this really a common workflow? Yes, once Hydrogen was the goto solution for linux drum stuff (and it's still a GREAT application). But with the advent of things like DrumGizmo, you can now avoid the multi-application-sync-communication issues and do most of each stage of musical production inside a single application.