as for it being tedious though a little

[clever dune]

This is stuff I want to visually simulate essentially.
Green is stuff I've already figured out,
so the wheel has all the bouncy movement etc

not necessarily this exact suspension setup
but something similar

animation seems like the way to go

[midnight trench]

for spinning parts a simple animation would work, you could look into procedural animation and take an inverse kinematic approach for more lever/joint type actions, and a stretching cylinder is probably sufficient for the spring

but yeah with the wheel providing all positional information it's just a case of utilising the already existing position of it with some fixed points in the car chassis where it makes sense

are you hoping to have some stiffness to the suspension and make the whole car chassis respond, or is this just localised to some movement in the suspension system itself?

[clever dune]

Is it really a wise thing to add rigidbodies to the mechanical bits?

I'm not hoping to have the mechanical/visual parts of the suspension impact the physics of the car in any way.

So, this is very much localized to each wheel

[midnight trench]

rigidbodies wouldn't be needed for any of those

no rb/colliders, just transforms & meshes