These days I'm using LrC v14. It has become so advanced I have not sent a file to PS since LrC v11. I have never saved any exported files from event shooting. I just keep the original RAW and the edits will be there forever. I can export them in any format. Even if I stopped using LrC I'd still have access to all my edited files. Made my life much easier.
This is central to what I’m asking. I do not want to be tied to one editor/defeloper (like Lightroom or anything else). So, in my first move away from Lightroom, it was simple …. I already had the TIFs.
if you were, hypothetically, wanting to move away from LRC right now (or at some point in the future), you would export all of your edited RAWs …. My question is: ‘what would you export them to? TIFs? JPGs? PNG?, HEIC? Something else? And, why would you pick the file structure?”