I have a probably ~$20k modular rack. It's a lot of fun to experiment with, but the fact that you don't have patch save/recall really slashes the utility.

Doing everything in a DAW is the most practical from a "business" standpoint, but it's way less amenable to creative exploration. You really have to know what you want already.

The practical compromise that works best for me is a well-designed hardware realtime synth. You have access to a small fraction of the design space of modular, but a higher fraction of the accessible design space sounds good, and you of course have patch save/recall.

Recently what I've been doing is creating modular patches, driving them with MIDI, and recording the output into my Elektron Tonverk using their on-device multisample recording. You can record samples at a bunch of different pitch/velocity pairs and save them into a multisample file.