Apply to children/Element state VS "If" formula to display initial value

Trying to understand the best practice here.

I have a sidebar that houses multiple steps/forms with multiple inputs. If a user clicks the button “create”, the user can create a new entry in the sidebar.

On the main table, if a user clicks “View” in front of the created entry, a boolean variable “sidebar_mode_VIEW” is set to true. I save the entry data into an object variable. Now I have 2 options to populate the data when the sidebar is being viewed:

  1. On the element’s initial value, created an “If” formula that shows data based on the sidebar_mode.

  2. Create a new element state and bind the conditional to sidebar_mode value.

For the second approach, will I be able to set a different initial value for element’s each new state? Have never used “apply to children”.