Like Aperture, Lightroom Classic does have an option to manage the images yourself, so you don't have to put the original files in the catalog (Adobe's version of Libraries). I moved from Aperture to LR within a year of the end of support, so to be honest I don't even remember how I set everything up. There will be a catalog either way, since it stores previews. That is how I do it, I started with Aperture as well, going from managed to self-managed, since it allows me to quickly manage backups between different drives. If you do use Lightroom you can set it to save a lot of the editing data to XMP files, which various programs can read to some extent.
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