This is totally leaving the original topic, but how do you work figure and table management? In my "smaller" papers, I have 50+ figures (dose-response curves, antibody prevalence curves, etc.) and 10+ tables. Just referencing them based on a handwritten caption, the thought makes my skin crawl.

We've gone full in and do most papers in R Studio directly. R Markdown and R Latex work OK, Zotero is integrated, and for the slower members of the team we offer pandoc conversions of their docx and html. But Pages... it does not seem to be made for anyone doing science :(

Our workflow is decidedly uncool and old-fashioned.

Scripts produce figures as PDF files. We aim to have the script produce more-or-less final figures, but sometimes the last 5-10% is easier to do manually.

We don't bother putting them into the manuscript text while editing, and the captions are usually on a separate page, as most of our target journals seem to require. The manuscript gets written in Word + Endnote, with ad-hoc figure reference like See Figure XXX_DOSE_RESPONSE_XXX that get find-replaced at the very end.

This is definitely a local optima (if that!), but works pretty well for us especially since it's a pretty diverse group: some computationally-minded folks might be happier with LaTex, but we've also got 85 year old prof, DoD folks, etc who want track changes and familiarity.