Interesting.
I have found that opening/unfreezing M4L devices in Max creates redundant folders of everything in your Max documents directory, which can be annoying as it seems to sometimes complain about files being in there when they are duplicates. Plus it can build up very quickly if you don’t manually clear it out every once in a while.
I personally never had the discipline for doing this, but I know a friend (is Pete not on here?) who is a big believer of working only in/on the amxd file directly. So you just build the patch in there, then only edit/manage it, without ever going back into a maxpat. For most of my stuff I end up managing a maxpat enough to get it to a project state, then dump out amxds as needed.
I guess part of the benefit of that is you have to deal with the back-and-forth stuff less once you’ve set it up properly?