Hey,
I have recently decided to quit max and use blender as my primary 3d modelling software. I don’t have a lot of experience with blender but I am still familiar with the basic things.
So, I followed this workflow in 3ds max where you could just apply a edit poly modifier over anything and then work further, thus creating checkpoints of the progress. It’s really helpful and saves a lot of time if you ever had to go back on your progress.
Unfortunately no, there is nothing like that in blender. You can hop over to right click select (https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/) and see if anyone else has made the suggestion. I know a lot of max users are comfortable with this workflow, and you aren’t the only one to be jumping ship recently, so you might be able to get a few upvotes.
Honestly though, I doubt you will ever see this kind of feature in blender. It’s too deep of an architectural change to the way that blender handles objects. The modifier stack itself is due for some significant, node based, updates as part of the everything nodes project, so a linear stack is most likely on the way out anyway.
For saving out in progress versions of a model, there is always your old friend ctrl+shift+s
