Is it possible to replace the angle bracket delimiters with a macro from scalerel?

Question

The fonts available to me do not support angle brackets that span more than a few lines. Sometimes, lists delimited by angle brackets can reach a large height, in particular if they contain multi-line elements:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{scalerel}
\begin{document}
$\left< 
    \left(\begin{array}{c} a\\b\\c\\d\\e \end{array}\right)
\right>$
\end{document}

With the scalerel package, one solution is:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{scalerel}
\begin{document}
$\stretchleftright[1000]{<}{
    \left(\begin{array}{c} a\\b\\c\\d\\e \end{array}\right)
}{>}$
\end{document}

My question is whether I can use the scalerel package to modify the meaning of the delimiters < and >, such that the outputs of the above examples will be equal.

I've read (TeXbyTopic, Section 21.2.2) that it is possible to define delimiters using, e.g. \def\langle{\delimiter ...}, but I do not know how to include a scalerel macro with \delimiter.

(There are at least two other approaches to finding larger angle brackets, (1) \DeclarePairedDelimiter from mathtools and (2) loading the glyph from a different font. My question would be whether re-defining the meanings of < and > would be another solution.)

Answer 1

\delimiter and \left are tex primitives that hook directly in to the extendable characters specified by the font, and can not reference any macro definitions in the way you intend.

You could, in principle redefine \left and \right to look ahead for the macro, but redefining such a well used primitive is quite likely to break something somewhere and just using the scalerel macro directly would be my recommendation.