I’ve also been doing lots of experimenting with Content Defined Chunking since last year (for https://bonanza.build/ ). One of the things I discovered is that the most commonly used algorithm FastCDC (also used by this project) can be improved significantly by looking ahead. An implementation of that can be found here: https://github.com/buildbarn/go-cdc
This lookahead is very similar to the "lazy matching" used in Lempel-Ziv compressors! https://fastcompression.blogspot.com/2010/12/parsing-level-1... Did you compare it to Buzhash? I assume gearhash is faster given the simpler per iteration structure. (also, rand/v2's seeded generators might be better for gear init than mt19937)
Regarding the RNG used to seed the GEAR table: I don't think it actually makes that much of a difference. You only use it once to generate 2 KB of data (256 64-bit constants). My suspicion is that using some nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers (e.g., the first 2048 binary digits of π) would work as well.