I responded to a somewhat related timeline question yesterday Applying Effects to Clips in Timeline - #2 by mathijslaser, so I’ll respond here too haha. As far as I know, unfortunately what you’re doing now is the only way to achieve this, but the timeline functionality will be heavily expanded in the future from what I understand.
You could get creative with the chase functionality if you want to more efficiently have lasers turn on and off in a pattern instead of duplicating tons of clips, but it’s not really flexible for what you are probably looking for.