When I developped my integration, I found it easiest to place it in core\homeassistant\components\duepi_evo (so not as a custom integration…)
Since I am working from my own devs core repository, i simply can push directly to it, however, I never create a push requests HA directly, instead I copy to my git custom integration folder and push there.
Since this custom repository is linked to HACS, it will be available shorty after in HA for everyone that uses it…
But yeah, I agree, I still have to copy. As long as my integration is not part of HA’s repository, I don’t think there is another solution…
For me working through HACS works fine…