How well does mutt work with multiple accounts though? Last I saw it seemed more cumbersome than Alpine for that.
Some quick googling[1] makes it look like you indeed do that first thing, and then set up a hook to load a different configuration file when you enter the folder for a different mailbox.
[1]: https://www.df7cb.de/blog/2010/Using_multiple_IMAP_accounts_...
Unless you actually need to do things like move entire e-mail threads between accounts, it works well enough.