All of my debian systems have their network configured with /etc/network/interfaces like so:

    iface wlan0 inet dhcp
        wpa-ssid redacted
        wpa-psk "redacted"

It's a bit clunky if I need to take a laptop around to different wifi networks, but I don't do that very much.

Personally, I replace it with connman[0], as I find connmanctl(1) to be far more usable than nmcli.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Connman

systemd-networkd

It actually works rather well but it doesn't have every feature that NetworkManager does.

I use netctl and find it works very well.

For non-wifi use cases you probably don't need anything at all (maybe dhcdcd).

I use wpa_supplicant + dhcpcd + wpa_gui and only have to update my config like once per year.