The thing that I had to fiddle with, was getting ssh and tramp to use the same ControlPath to share sockets because it helped make things smooth if you had setup ssh to use ssh-agent and persist connections already.
But yeah, I get why just giving up on tramp has been easier over the years. Besides connecting there's also annoyances on spotty internet that make avoiding it usually a better experience. I think I haven't relied much on tramp after trying to use it and realising tmux+emacs was overall better at the time, mainly because I could just hop on my workstation to the exact same session I was using once RTO happened. Nowadays I use it mostly for sudo and one off things, but not remote projects with remote compile and lsp anymore.