This mirrors my experience. The Solr Cluster that we have in production requires full time attention of our infrastructure team.
Never bothered with solr cloud and our simple replicated cluster that pretty much auto scales from 3 nodes to 100+ across multiple regions takes maybe a few hours of maintenance every few months, and no one dedicated to baby sit it...
In summary, avoid SolrCloud like plague.
I had an opposite experience: solr was rock solid and didn’t require too much maintenance.