You could try just getting rid of the chunk loading and having everything loaded at once. Then just control what gets rendered and updated. Instead of infinite it could just be a large world and if optimized properly it should not need to be steamed in. You can still use the chunk system to prevent rendering far away chunks.
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Yeah, that makes sense. I got the agent working on something along those lines this morning... I'll post back if it succeeds.
The main reason I have it doing an "infinite world" is just that I am not an artist so wanted pure procgen producing the game world. But I should be able to use that to pre-bake a sizable hunk of the world, I would hope, and do less on-the-fly generation at runtime. Then, as you say, fall back to JIT loading if the player exceeds the large pre-baked initial area.