I disagree with half of that.
Alchemize is a decent ability in and of itself as while slightly increasing the stat scaling of food may not seem like much, it adds up over the course of a run, especially in infinite.
Replica, meanwhile, isn’t purely dependent on the item also working on Chip as it allows you to save money on normal runs by letting you temper 1 item a bunch and have it buff the tank as well. Additionally, if you somehow get multiple chips in your team (wink wink) you can effectively use replica to hyper focus on a single mon in infinite mode and give them significantly more items than they could otherwise hold at once. (Parra w/ 3 wind slicer & 7 spell vortex go brrrr…)