[herpdyderp]

It's been a while now but I got Inkscape (free but clunky Illustrator alternative) to do shape replication across a path for me once, and then I copied the result into Affinity Designer. Obviously if you need to do that frequently, it's not gonna work well but I've only had to do that a few times since ditching Adobe.

[Tagbert]

I've also used Inkscape to do the image tracing and export to SVG. I don't like Inkscape for other purposes but it is useful for that.