How do you deal without grouping?

My models are often made using subsurface and bevel modifier. I don’t want to collapse those modifier and join meshes for performance reasons so the only thing I find is of course making linked object from another blend file. But this come with downside: I can’t change materials in main scene, I’ve must to change material in linked blend file.
Sadly, there’s no instanced parameters like in Unreal.

I wish that someday, someone add something like a simple tick (similar to turning off visibility in viewport and for render and etc.) to collection: select collection hierachy. So when I have chair made from few object, whenever I click on those subbject I select whole collection, not only one object like it behaviour today.
It is also possible to add shortcut for select grouped > collection, but it still not the same functional thing like in Max.

If I understand correctly your problem one solution would be instead of linking from another file, keep your original objects in one collection “chair components” either out of the way or hidden in viewport/render (could also be in its own scene). Then instance the collection to treat all the objects as one group “chair”. You can edit the sub-objects parameters in the original collection and have the instanced copy as a “whole” to work with in your main scene.