I'm old school and have used quilt for patching kernels for a couple of
decades and have used it before devtool (or even git) existed! There
are probably better ways now but quilt is muscle memory.

  Then another (dirtier?) option would be to patch quilt-native
itself, setting QUILT_PC to the relative ./patches/.pc

Sadly it doesn't help my use case as I'm used to changing to some
random WORKDIR and using the host's copy of quilt to save messing with
PATH :/.

Cheers,

Richard