Based on the latest (excellent) tutorial in this channel, I am experimenting with color look up table to replace those.
I think that Lab is scene-referred (someone please correct me if I am wrong), and the module uses radial basis functions to interpolate, which solves the spline monotonicity problem for me.
I know it is not a drop-in replacement, but I consider working in 3D space instead 3 x 1D space an advantage, it is much easier to isolate a specific “color”. I rarely want to do something to “all greens”, I usually want to tweak a specific area, and in color equalizer this is not feasible.