hardhat-template VS hardhat-gas-reporter

It seems like every single week, I see things about Foundry. As someone that has been using a fairly standard Hardhat template for my projects the past year, I feel like this gets the job done, but I am wondering what I am missing?

To help getting started easier I am looking into some boilerplate starter kits such as https://github.com/paulrberg/solidity-template etc. Basic question, but what is the best practice in terms of organizing your smart contract dev stuff such as .sol files, hardhat, solhint, solcover, etc. with your front-end (website) dApp code? Do you keep everything in one repository? Do you keep them separated? The front-end part (let's say Sveltekit for example) and ethers.js need the ABI json right? When you deploy your front-end website and are keeping everything in one repo, should you exclude your contract files from the build? I suppose the JS framework will already exclude folders like /contracts that are in the root from the build.

I also really like this template for a web3+React website with a simple connect button: https://github.com/PaulRBerg/solidity-template

..and if you are looking for a general toolchain I really love the starter template here: https://github.com/PaulRBerg/solidity-template

With hardhat-gas-reporter we can see how much expensive each implementation is.

Deploying the contract in Polygon and minting costed around $0.80, including some NFTs minting. Compared to Ethereum mainnet, it would have been some thousand bucks. Despite that it is also a good idea to optimize the contract, and check the gas costs. Here's a great tool if you're using Hardhat.

I can get a neat report with hardhat-gas-reporter for my own contracts, but I don't know how to do that for third-parties if they don't happen to be using Hardhat too - or if they have no test suites at all.