Thanks for the tip, I didn't know of it, but if I'm not mistaken it doesn't load LV2/VST3 natively? If I have my Carla session open it shows the plugins, but I can't open their UIs, and I don't see a way to add them if it's not loaded. Plus it's a JACK client, not Pipewire from what I can tell. So neat tool but not a 1:1 replacement :) I also don't think automatic connections would work for me as some of my patches have sidechains.

My biggest gripe with Carla was indeed that it holds the internal connections between plugins but doesn't autoconnect applications, so whenever you change patches or pause your streaming client for more than 15s you need to tell it to connect again. So my current setup is one big "master patch" with several chains inside, that end in a 4-channel A/B switcher I use to change between the headphone and speaker chains for example, plus a simple bash script that loops forever (sleeping if everything is ok) and does some pw-link calls. It ended up being a lot less janky than I was expecting tbh :D (happy to share if anyone is interested)