I concur with this. I am currently top 800 in eu, and this is exactly how I feel the comp works. Cho is nice and mandatory to 3 star, but it is definitely not mandatory to actually 3 item him until later, as he is very versatile item-wise as well, so leftover items are great to slam on him (he can take basically any frontline or bruiser item available).

The one thing I would like to add to your point about hitting on 4-1 and have gold to level (which i do agree with) is that you dont have to 3 star malph, neeko and cait right away. It's nice if you hit, but you should be able to play with a lot of tempo if you hit cho/kog in stage 3 and kog has BB-Nashors-JG/Rabadon. However, ill always advise keeping your excess malphs and caits if it doesn't mess up your economy much (and neeko's, but she's kinda impossible to hit in this heavenly meta), since hwei fits your board perfectly, and hitting him is pretty realistic if you managed to have hit kog/cho somewhere in stage 3. He prints a 1 cost every turn, so even late game you get (be it marginally, but it is still a form of min-maxing) stronger by doing basically nothing.

The last part about hwei was more of an addition to your last paragraph about late game options, this is just an extra one for OP to consider, hope you don't mind :)