I recently went through this exercise and settled on HFS+ over exFAT. Reliability seems a bit better with some edge cases, and I don’t expect I’ll be put into a situation where I’m not able to read HFS+ drives.
(Though probably not appropriate if you’re primarily not a mac user, or won’t be in the future.)
You're assuming Apple is going to continue even supporting HFS+ long term. They already convert volumes to APFS opportunistically.