I use refind also, there should be a setting somewhere to let refind scan entries from other EFI partitions. I have that setup and just created a second EFI partition for my Linux setup, so that Windows has no idea Linux even exists. I even have everything running off of the same drive (my laptop only has one nvme slot) and I haven’t had any issues.

Reminder: Most devs actually care about the things they make. This is a management/timeline problem, not a developer one.