My problem with this take is that, to me your first impulse sounds like the correct way to play. You're taking the story seriously, you're afraid of the ramifications of ceremorphosis (It is to be avoided!).
Instead of gating story content behind long rests I'd hope we get different story content between the two. Forcing a player to long rest for no other reason than to spam story triggers is bad design.
Completely agree. Even if Larian do nothing at all to the resting mechanic, they should absolutely change the way companion interactions work so you don’t need to long rest to get the content that’s related to conversations you have in the world and you don’t get locked out of other companion camp conversations when approval jumps too quickly. It’s ridiculous at the moment, potentially needing to rest every couple of conversations the first time you visit the grove (particularly with Gale, for whom you can easily lock yourself out of pretty much any interactions), and then companions seeming so quiet later in the act when they’ve run out of things to say.
That said, unless it was going to be made downright impossible to rest without food or supplies, this doesn’t have any bearing on the OP’s suggestion at least. If you’re only resting to get camp content, then a partial rest is sufficient, and you can do that without supplies. Though granted some of the other suggestions here would only be feasible once the camp dialogue design was fixed.
