Certificate authentication is overkill and rolling it yourself is painful enough that huge companies have been built around it (Teleport). Unless you're an enterprise SSHer with tons of ephemeral hosts, use public keys instead.
I'd guess they just talk about pub key authentication?
I mean, it sounds like in OP's case it's 1 service instance to small N (maybe even 1) potential systems to deploy from. Manual SSH public key deployment doesn't scale to corporate scale, but it certainly scales that far