Does anyone know of any sources that outline a more elegant way to handle this? Would it be something like a data store in the users library that just somehow k

Does anyone know of any sources that outline a more elegant way to handle this? Would it be something like a data store in the users library that just somehow keeps track of the same data? Are there practical reasons that still make .DS_Store a compelling solution? Kinda interested how you’d go about designing something like this, and I don’t have much FS knowledge.