That seems unhelpfully puristic. Most of can only think about complex situations by breaking them up into parts we can think about in some degree of isolation ā even if we have to review our analysis when forming an overall judgement.
I have done that too, but it tends to take a fair amount of trouble. One the one hand one wants settled positions, on the other they should be far away enough not to influence the local position, unless it is a fully enclosed Life & Death problem. A lot of the time, what we want is for the surroundings of the local position to be effectively dame ā but sometimes we may be well-advised to look at forcing moves on the outside, and their value depends heavily on the surroundings. Actually, OP was a little vague about what sort of positions they wanted to study!
I suppose a lot of the time appropriate surroundings would be several live groups with long chains approaching the position to be studied; those chains could be cut back to give the local position more space. Several live groups is probably better than few, otherwise the surroundings may have too large areas dominated by one colour.
What might be useful in this context would be a small collection of ready-to-use whole (maybe also Ā¾ and Ā½) board positions for a given size with instructions for adjusting them to produce desired type of surrounding for a given local situation.