Help me pick the right electronics hardware for a filament printer

[curious aardvark]

I assume they look more like CNC routers with big gantries and linear components?

Thinking about it - yes they do :-)
So what's wrong with building one of those ?
You can simply use 20x20 or 30x30 aluminium extrusion for the gantry. It won't bend :-)
Has the advantage of being cheap, very easy to attach things to and slide things along and super rigid. Much better than mucking about with rods and screws and the like.
You could build a horizontal carriage with the hotend below the extrusion and the motor above.

The 'wood grain' analogy is a good one and angus is probably the only 3d printing youtuber I have any time for.

But you have to bear in mind that it's also material specific. Flexibles - for example - have almost perfect layer bonding no matter what orientation you print them at.
A stiff flexible pla is brilliant for parts that need to be virtually indestructible, have flex and resist impact but also need structural stiffness.
I've yet to see any kind of layer bonding issue with any flexible.

Pet-g is an interesting one. sometimes it seems to have great layer bonding and sometimes not - I'm starting to lean towards moisture absorbance being the issue with my cheaper pet-g.
The sun-lu stuff - at the moment- I have is definitely nowhere near as tough as the colorfab xt.

Thinking it needs a session in the dehydrator.

But anyway, the basic gist is that layer bonding is as much material driven as print orientation driven. So don't necessarily let that be a defining factor in your choice.

And i suspect the reason people don't muck about with gear ratios that often, is simply that most of us have no bloody clue how to rewrite firmware to get custom gearing actually working :-)