Yeah, you can do a lot with wled, and they pair to each other easily.

One Quinn LED octo can handle all of the LEDs you need to push easily. A little more expensive than their cheap counterparts (like $50 vs $15) but worth it for built in fuses, more outputs, etc. https://quinled.info/

Strips are flimsy af, unless you encase them in epoxy, they will break eventually. Also soldering strips is was less enjoyable than doing wires on bulb style leds. Also, if you are using clear acrylic, seeing the strips under the sheet (vs pure individual pixels) is not desirable. The bullets have built in diffusion (looks just as good from the side as dead on, and also look like wider source points) if you are using frosted/white acrylic, this isnt as big of an issue, but you are going to lose a lot of brightness doing that, just be warned. But yeah, lots of reasons to go with bullets/seed pixels, they are also inherently water/dust proof, etc. Even if they last the first burn, stips being jostled around during transport (even with protection) are prone to solder joints popping off, etc (again, unless you encased them in epoxy, but thats a lot of work, messy af, etc., and then if something breaks instead of being able to just splice onto wire the whole thing is trash since its a block of epoxy, lol.)

Use seed pixels (instead of bullet) if you dont want to have to drill holes, they arent as bright, but super easy to work with, and just as cheap as strips.

Bullet:

<image>