So I turned to Bruno. I have been happy with it but there are some strange issues. Sometimes it does not save settings when I press Ctrl s. I still don't know when this happens but I lost some work a couple of times because of this.
I hope Bruno has support for separate environments and environment-level variables soon because the ability to set global variables along with environment-specific variables/overrides makes the setup much more manageable (I think there is a feature request already open for this).
PS: if this possible via some sort of external JSON/script, I am more than happy to set that up. I am just not familiar enough with Bruno tips/tricks :(
The fix for me: cmd+s only works if the left pane (Query, Body, etc) has focus
Save does not work if the right pane (Response, Headers, etc) has focus