I haven't used a mac in years, but I know for sure that I had found a workaround. I would go insane without "Alt+." on the shell, I use it very, very frequently.
Thanks, i'm using iTerm2, which seems to have an experimental feature for repeat previous character escape sequence enabled by default, but doesn't really work that well, I suspect it's the touchbar escape key that doesn't play too nicely to the hold
edit: I'm dumb, that was for iTerm, I got it working!