Changing to PC - Mac Drive Options?

Hi Guys, after a billion years as an Apple guy I've been talked into switching from my Macs to a shiny new PC for Color Grading in Resolve Studio. It's a beast and can just rip through complex 8k grades so fast that my coffee breaks are getting very short... but...

I have a challenge. All of my backup and old but still active film project files are sitting on Mac hard drives, in both APFS and Mac OS Extended formats. I need a way to edit off these - just reading as I'll write outputs and caches to the PC drives. It seems that I can do this either by using software on the PC, MacDrive 11 Pro and Paragon HFS+ seem to be the big boys. Or by creating an ex-FAT drive on the Mac and copying everything from the project over to this and then using it for everything on the PC, including outputs and caches if needs be.

I'm concerned about consistent reliability/readability and speed - speed is a big one as having massive render speeds with slow read speeds is pointless. In the future guess I have to use PC formatted ex-FAT drives for the entire projects to keep PC/Mac joint compatibility. Any ideas or opinions would be invaluable, guys...

Chris

Paragon, if you want reliability, they even support APFS now.
Definitely not exFAT.
Paragon also has a solution for the Mac to use NTFS.

i have eight machines with Paragon, both PC and Mac
works as it should, invisiable to the user, read write to HFS on PC, NTFS on Mac
we try to avoid APFS where possiable, should it rear it's fairly ugly head, it's been safer to copy through a PC
we still get APFS drives randomly eating themselves, happens less on the PC's

I need a way to edit off these

I would advise a different approach.

Copy the contents to NTFS drives.

i've standardized on HFS, everything but internal and DAS are formatted HFS even tho i'm working on PC 98% of the time, it's easier for interchange with other facilities and cleints
no real world downsides

No problems here with HFS+ drives under Paragon on a dozen of PCs over the years in student labs.
They simply don’t need to care (and are surprised when their Mac drives don’t work on PCs outside of our facilities).

As long as you are ok with copying your data over to a new device, another option would be to invest in a NAS of sufficient speed and size, especially one that can be also attached locally via Thunderbolt/USB 3.2/ or 10 GB Ethernet. It can be easily accessed both by windows and MacOS, as the file transfer relies on a network protocol (SMB/Samba) rather than a specific, OS dependant file system.
A NAS could also provide you with quite a few additional useful features, such as improved data security (Raid/redundancy), advanced backup mechanisms, snapshots and many other nice things.