Sorry mate, that’s quite wordy and it has a difficult flow to it. From what I gather is that you’re describing 8-way tile bitmasking. And I understand that fully - I was using it 30 years ago, not to mention a GDevelop solution I made with it a while back.
I don’t think so, unless OP has changed their mind and decided that adjacent cells/blocks affect each other. Which is not something they mentioned in their initial post.
And sure, you could place objects on a layer and zoom out. That’s a viable option, but could prove tricky - that zoom would have to be 100% accurate (not 99%) so each object is exactly the size of a pixel. Any thing slightly smaller or larger and you’ll get single objects covering 2 pixels or objects being left out.