The crystal shards are still the most effective way to gather all but one of the G4 raw materials, and they are still very easy to find on the known planets even without the POI signal. You touch down on the planet and litteraly just fly for a few minutes, and you will find them spread all over the surface, and there are loads of spots with high density. You only need one of these high density spots to fill your bin.
Yes, it is a bit of a trip. Before the grelic shortcut they used to say "make it part of the 5k Palin trip". You can do that in a throwaway barebones unengineered AspX or DBX in around 40 jumps. An unengineered DBX with nothing but a small shield for bumps, a vehicle hangar, a fuel scoop and a 5A FSD does 37 ly. Yes, it's a 10 MCr. paper plane, but it will do the job.
And yes, that's a trip of an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Slap a DSS on the boat and make some exploration money from the trip. Make it an event. Take some time out visit the crystal shard planets, fill all your G4 bins and trade down what you need - I do that every time my raw mats go low, once or twice per year. If you are bad at it, it will take three play sessions (one for the trip to the shards, one to collect, one to go back). Or two if you take the rebuy express.
With all engineering, the "I need it now because I want to do this or that" is the wrong approach. You need to collect when you don't need them. Same with manufactured materials; collect any HGEs you come across, and take Biotech Conductors and Exquisite Focus Crystals everytime you can get them as mission rewards. If you start collecting when you want to engineer, you are too late, basically.
TL;DR: Crystal Shard sites still work, just haul you behind over there.
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