A cam cleat makes much better sense.
Not necessarily. Cam cleats are good for lines that need to be readjusted often or for lightly loaded lines that are ser&forget, like lazy jacks for example. I submit that a halyard isn't one of these. A properly sized sheetstopper (clutch) shouldn't "eat" line/rope - I've had seven clutches on my 33 year old boat, mine for 24 of those, still working fine, line & all.
My point about bringing a halyard back on a small boat is that keeping luff tension is pretty easy because the forces are simply not that much. We are talking about an 18 foot boat here, folks. I did it on my Catalina 22 on windy SF Bay, no clutch and no winch. Sweating the line off a cleat is all it needed. If "true luff"
was desired, bring the mainsail up by hand and add a cunningham, which could be 1:1 on a boat that size.
Trying to save
@MHJ on unnecessary hardware, that's all.
If anything needed mechanical assist it would be the jib halyard, not the main.