[RCC] Would love some constructive critique on this processing!

Ah, ok. I still think it would be better to have the stars with more natural colours even in the context of quasi-narrowband imagery. Aesthetically they are more pleasing to the eye and since you already separating the stars from the nebula you might as well do it (in Siril for example). As for clipping the shadows it depends where you cut the histogram when converting from linear to non-linear and what have you used to do that. As the whole area is awash in radiation, gas and dust it stands to reason not to expect to be any pitch black areas in there. In other words there needs to be showing some level of gray (if the background is set to neutral) on the whole of the image. I don't have the set myslef so I cannot replicate the image with a different processing. As for the cosmic ray hits the best way is to rubber-stamp them with nearby areas without the hits, with some form of blending depending on the strength of the hits. Sizewise I'd say around 5 pixels would do.