Another way of doing this is assign Hyper key to Caps Lock with Karabiner and then use that to set up hyper+X shortcuts to different or macros using Hammerspoon.
So e.g. I have hyper+a for Alacritty, hyper+b for Browser etc.
Yep, this was the way I use it too. I had 'qmk' shortcuts but later moved to hammerspoon approach.
Right now trying this set up . Andweeb's 'Ki Spoon' [1] for much efficient workflow. It is still under development
I do the same (though I use spacehammer which is built on top of hammerspoon). It's been the biggest game changing in my keyboard-driven productivity. I don't like how it feels non-deterministic to command-tab since the order of the apps change. With a hotkey for each I know exactly what will show up when I hit the key, and better than using function keys, I don't have to move my hand from home row, plus it works when I use an external keyboard (which is most of the time).
You can also make your Spacebar (with a tiny delay not to interfere with typing) an app-launcher key, and then you don't even need to move your poor pinky for such frequent
space+r for browser
space+f for file manager, etc.
This is what I did in stumpwm. And I had a nice macro so I could define an app's command, what key to map to, what desktop it lives on, and whether jumping to the window or pulling it to me was the default.
1. https://github.com/andweeb/Ki