PostgreSQL high availability setup along with Read-Replica's

Question

i want to setup postgres high availability cluster with one Master (Primary DB) and two Slaves (Standby) along with PGPOOL for load balancing.

Postgres version 15

Im using repmgr for streaming replication setup and automatic failover.

Requirement

1. to have synchronous streaming replication between Master and Slave to have consistent data and avoid any data loss.
2. Standby need to accept read connections.

Question:

1. List item

If we want to set Slave to accept application read connections via pgpool we need to set hot_standby = on, adding to that we need to set few other parameters max_standby_archive_delay and max_standby_streaming_delay then in this case can we set synchronous commit on?

2. Also without setting hot_standby to ON we can not use the standby for read operations?