Exporting particle simulation into a different file and moving it

Hi!
I’ve made a particle simulation on a moving and displacing icosphere in a separate file, as the main one is too heavy already.
I thought I will link the simulation into the main file, but linking/appending did not work as the baked cache seemed to not load. Another problem was that the object couldn’t be moved (needs to be moved more to the back of the scene)
So I tried exporting it as an alembic file, but that was way too heavy (15k particles in individual objects) and couldn’t be used anyways as I need the particle age info for materials.

Whats the proper workflow I should be doing here, am I missing something?
Thanks.