Hi Ethan :D
I didn't try it completely but I wanted to know your opinion. Wouldn't it be a solution to continue working with procedural bumps (through cycles maybe) and at the end bake it out as a normal map? I know you would lose parametric control of the node tree but at the end it would enable the opportunity to keep using white and black images.
I didn't try it out in eevee but I did bake a huge tree of bumps and normal maps for a mech model I made to optimize my scene and the result was fine.
Hi Juan! Absolutely that would be a solution. It might be a bit of a slowdown, because you'll have to switch over to cycles (eevee doesn't support baking right at the moment), and like you said you'll loose the parametric control, but you'll end with that crisp render that you need. :)
Where that solution might not be as helpful is if you're in a workflow with a client for example and need to make a lot of changes... also, if you're layering textures with different mapping (texture with object mapping over a texture with uv mapping, for example) you might need to be baking out some insane resolution images to compensate.
There's certainly room to play around though and find a workflow that works for you!