Those of you NOT using buffer tabs, how do you efficiently manage editing multiple files?

I currently use barbar, but same applies to many "buffers as tabs" plugins. My workflow is probably pretty common:

FZF/Telescope to open multiple files for editing. If I need to see them side-by-side, splits, otherwise, the buffers show as tabs. Barbar doesn't sort by recently used, but I've used buffers-as-tabs plugins in the past that did that (IIRC, bufferline), which helped.

I have a series of standard keymaps assigned to these for switching left/right and closing, and if I need to fuzzy find a buffer, telescope.

I know this is supposedly a vim anti-pattern, and "not the vim way." I'm also feeling the pain of my current plugins which don't sort by MRU, but that's sort of a separate issue from the buffer-as-tabs UI.

What is the "vim way" to do this?

What I've tried:

Fuzzy finding (searching) for a buffer is a fallback, but it's quite a bit more keystrokes than hitting bnext/bprev shortcuts a time or two. The other challenge with this is that it presents the challenge that all the hop/leap/etc plugins aim to address, where I can't see the context until the picker already appears.

I know about harpoon, but haven't tried it yet. I don't consistently work across the same files, and if I do, these would be the only ones open in buffers, so it seems like that's already covered. Maybe I'm missing the potential here...?

I've tried a few other buffer selectors that don't model as tabs, but instead bring up the buffers in a selection dialog. One of the more interesting ones (don't recall the name) brought up the dialog as part of the BufferNext/Prev commands, so it was sort of buffer bar on demand. The problem with this is it seemed like there was no way to know what files I was already working with until looking at the select, so I found myself falling back to using Telescope as CtrlP to fast open the files (again, more typing). Anything that has me typing a fuzzy filename search seems to be a productivity fail.

Splits are great when they're warranted, but I often want more coding context and to use the entire window for a single buffer.

If you don't use buffers-as-tabs and have something you consider more efficient, what is it? I've been using some variation of vim for coding since 2001, and this is the main thing where I still don't get what I'm supposedly missing. I keep hearing my way is the wrong way, but I haven't had that "ahah moment."

edit: Okay, okay. I'm disabling barbar and installing harpoon today and will give it some time to see how it impacts my workflow. Thanks for the feedback. I hope this goes well.