If you're not needing 4K for pan and zoom effects, make your originals 2K, stick with 2K through the whole process, it'll be easier.
What are you exporting your image sequences as? ProRes 422 is plenty, but H.264 is good, also. Depends on what your final viewing experience will be. Theater? TV broadcast? Web video?
Be sure you have plenty of free space on your system drive. 15% of total capacity is bare minimum, so you want more than that.
Turn off Background Rendering, delete all render files regularly.
A Mac Studio M1 should handle even ProRes 422 just fine, no need for proxies on that machine.
How long is your Project timeline? Eventually, if a Library/Project gets really large, you'll hit a performance limit, and there's not much to do after that.
Lastly, put your Library and everything on a very fast external drive. I use an 8-bay RAID with great performance. But I also do lots and lots of projects and need the storage. A single, very large SSD drive with fast throughput would be enough for most work.
System and Library hygiene are vital to performance...
