i gave it a look with TES5Edit, and the esp looksquite ok. a few remaining ITMs, but nothing that should cause much trouble, if you place the file high in your load order, just below the unofficial patches.
if the mod is otherwise finctional without issues, i see no reason to abandon it. what i gathered from comments is that the NPCs may not despawn or clean up propperly, or may never stop to spawn new ones, so should the old ones not be killed, this would bloat your save and slow down everything. didn't try the mod myself, but if you experienced this, dirty edits are the least problem of this mod.
and i don't know of a mod that does something similar. immersive patrols comes closest in my oppinion, but you gave that one a try already