As far as I’m aware lift, gamma, gain has always been an essential part to color grading and I don’t know any colorist grading in linear aside from switching temporarily to it to adjust scene exposure perhaps but not tonal/artistic control. Maybe this is different in the CG/VFX industry but you can make both methods work I guess.
The latest OCIO config of ACES does support the Reference Gamut Compression. Haven’t tested it yet though.
Workflow wise limitations in Blender can be worked around by adding the RRT+ODT as a display transform into the Blender filmic config so you can keep working in linear srgb but previs with the ACES look so it will match what you’ll end up seeing in Natron. This isn’t the same as rendering in ACEScg ofcourse but this can be a choice.
I’ve tested this setup some time ago and worked quite well from what I could tell. Sharing my config here.
As to having the look of other rendering systems inside ACES maybe this topic can help.
For the rest of the workflow I’m with the what Daniel suggested above this post.