Rebuilding my Music library from scratch

Just want to see if my plan is any good.

After upgraded from High Sierra to Big Sur on my Mac mini, Music upgraded my iTunes library and it’s been problematic. Many album arts don’t show, some changes made are not remembered, etc. I’ve been troubleshooting more or less continuously, and this community is of great help, especially from contributions by turingtest2. But I want this nonsense to stop. My plan is to spend a few days to rebuild my library from scatch with a simple setup and hopefully resolve these problems once and for all.

My goal is to build a new Music folder on an external drive, fully self contained and ready to be used by any Mac to play songs, sync songs to an iPhone, and clone for backup. No more reliance on a seperate iTunes folder, external song files, artwork, etc. 

I have 1000 albums, 17,000 tracks, totalling 450GB. Most are imported from CDs as Apple lossless m4a files. I have added custom metadata (track name, composer, grouping, etc.), custom cover art, ratings to these files.

Kindly let me know if these steps are any good:

1. Keep my original High Sierra iTunes folder (pre-Music) as a safe copy.
2. In Music, export library as XML file, so that all my playlists can be recreated later on. (Despite other mess with Music, my playlists are good.)
3. Use Mac mini Big Sur Disk Utility to erase and format an external HDD drive (HFS+, ignore ownership).
4. Launch Music, create a new Music library stored on the external drive (verify I have “owner” permission to this folder).
5. Set preference to “Keep Music Media folder organized” and uncheck “Automatically update artwork”.
6. Choose File/Import to import music from my High Sierra iTunes folder (inside iTunes Music/Music). I expect Music to make a copy of all the songs and store them inside the new Music Library.musiclibrary package. Perhaps do this in small chunks. When completed I should see all songs in my library.
7. Import the Library.xml file created earlier to recreate all my playlists. 
8. My expectation is the old iTunes folder should no longer be needed. Going forward all media, database, (may be artwork cache as well?) live inside the self-contained Music Library.musiclibrary package. Any Macs with the same version of Music can plug this drive in and play the music.

I think my song ratings may not survive using this method. What I’ve done is I’ve created 5 (non-smart) playlists, each playlist contains all my songs that are 1 star, 2 star ... 5 star. These playlists are part of the Library.xml file exported. Hopefully when I import this xml file into the new library, I will see these 5 playlists, where I can select all tracks within each playlist and rate them accordingly.