Yes indeed the 'ticket mask' decides on nonces returned, and yes you still have to send work every few ms for a number of BM1397.
Alas I'm not sure what this overpowered computer is that you seem to think you need.
For a single BM1397 you can run about a dozen on tiny RPi power
That's about the block generation on the controller, and that's not hard to do even on tiny hardware (to be more specific regarding the esp32-c3; its a single core that also has to do the wireless comms, and the time needed for that depends on the link quality and so does the jitter in block generation timing).