Hmm, I’ve been poking around in AE but when using the Animation codec, I believe the only place to specify field handling is in the Render Settings, where I’m set to Fields Off. (When going out to ProRes, you have an additional option in the codec settings, but not so with Animation).
I’m curious about this too actually. Your solution is fine for stroke but what about copying Mask data and pasting it into the Position of another layer (so the layer follows the path)? You could precomp and time-reverse but this seems sloppy…