with Karabiner, you can make it so that a tap of caps lock emits an escape, while still being able to use it as a ctrl modifier when pressed in conjunction with other keys: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/document.html#configuration-c...

I don’t think karabiner elements supports that and I believe that the old karabiner no longer works with current versions of Mac OS

The latest version of Elements has supported this for several months, if not longer (I think they'd made it work for High Sierra at least, but I could be wrong about the exact timing.)

I use it for both Caps Lock -> Escape/Control and Return -> Return/Control and it's indispensible.

This is brilliant