The cheaper/home brewish solution is to to put a large psu and the pixel controller together on some mounting board and put a 25ft tail on your pixel bar and run It back to the controller/psu Good option when the budget is low The green connectors you see on a lot of controllers will unplug from the controller to make transport of the bars easy
If you don’t mind dealing direct with China star times led is a great resource for everything led strip otherwise a lot of there products are marked up +200% and resold all over ammazon under other brands

Side note pixel protocol used post controller usually stars to get buggy after about 35ft of cable to strip

What you are describing in your post is the expensive/plug and go solution I used in a project recently due to cable run lengths of +100’ was the entech pixelator system . the controller had to be integrated at the strip for the signal to make it all the way to the end of the cable Worked like a charm for 150 5m bars in a room with 117ft to the roof

Hope that helps

OLA is Open Lighting Architecture .. lets you convert one type to another .. but generally it has an ArtNet interface and lots of fun output interfaces including SPI. For some thoughts: last year I built 4 4'x8x16' steps we used on stage. We drove them with SPI Controllers .. that worked great .. but was expensive. The reason I went pi is the pi itself is $35 and built in wireless .. fadecandy is $22 .. can drive a pixel set of 64x8. This year we're building 12 steps 8'x8"x9" with 6 rows of 64 px driving off the QLC. I have githubs of the ansible code I use for all of this .. happy to share.

Some things to consider:

• PI - there is raspberry pi zero form factor .. which is quite small ;) I am experimenting with those now as full replacements for the Pi-B's and C's I have ( I used to teach with PIs so I have a bunch of em )
• interference - 802.11 can be impacted by bad dimmers .. things near by ( high amperag fryer, microwave), channel collisions with existing APs and most easily .. if it's visible lots of things will try to connect even with a password. Set your wifi to NOT broadcast the BSSID. And check the wifi spectrum when you get to a venue ;)
• amperage .. make sure you have enough to drive your px .. specifically something north of 80 px in a single strand you'll wanna inject power on the other end. The overall power supply doesn't have to be crazy .. but investing in a good volt-ohm-amp meter meter is worth it for testing and validation.
• universes .. I've successfully transmitted 4-6 U over a single SSID of 802.11bng . If each px is individually addressed .. and you're using RGB .. then each px is 3 DMX channels. Each U is 512 channels .. that gives you 170 px in a single U and QLC doesn't handle crossing U in a single fixture.. but does handle things with matrixes .. so you'll have to play around with the config and layout. You can always use the same channel(s) for multiple fixtures of the same type.
• road-rash .. touring with such a rig .. plan spares of everything and have a test program you can run to make sure it looks right. The LED strips don't handle LOTS of bending .. but some. The "Sticky" on the back is for shit. plan clear tape or something else to make sure they stay mounted whereever you're putting them. Also .. the "joining" kits you can to connect 2 strips work reasonably well .. BUT they dont' like to move alot. We've started soldering them on to the strips once we have the design set.

Please feel free to reach out any time .. do lots of work in this space and always willing to help ;)

Hey.. So I have done exactly this ;) My design used these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N8TVMAZ and I controlled them via QLC+ running on MBP using ArtNET -> Ethernet -> Controller. Some quick notes about these controllers:

• they work across universes, so since you're using RGBW ( as I did ) if you set channel 1 to Universe 1 and set the length over 128 LEDs (4Chan each) .. it will take data from Universe 2 starting at LED 129 .. means you can have longer strings than 1U of channels
• This means you can daisy-chain the control line from one step to the next. I did this using TRS cables and plugs fairly easily, just gottta watch your length.
• do NOT use the controllers to feed power, connect it inline AFTER the controller and before strips, the internal circuits don't handle the amp draw. Good news is even if that part of the controller circuit blows it's fuse, the signal line will continue to work just fine (been there done that ;)
• DO configure them with hard IPs vs DHCP .. cause they do not persistently check for DHCP, require a reset if they don't get the IP on first go.

I've used these controllers on 3 different shows and had good luck with them. If you're curious I've also done LED Matrixes on the faces of the steps using ArtNET -> Raspi -> Fadecandy. See https://youtu.be/SdmkEUZQ8zo?t=654 .. the Radio in the back is using the above controller .. the steps are as noted. PM me if I can help ;)