It’s very annoying that people raise a question/issue but then never respond to anyone else posting comments on it; my guess is that they did not find a solution.
I’m sorry but:
- I didn’t get an answer until long time later.
- I’m barely using Strapi nowadays.
- Strapi forum emails were going to spam.
Regarding the solution, AFAIR I ended up doing the second option. One of the interesting things of Strapi is not needing to build queries manually, so I preferred to have redundant data while being able to just rely on graphql queries (with lower cost).