Personally I just factor in 10 days for my project and have a board made with pcb assembly. JLC is so friggin cheap it isn't worth it to me to bother with doing stuff on perfboard anymore. Last project I made was a UV lamp for curing resin and it was like 8 days from submitting the order to having a finished board in my hand.
Personally, I have some test/dev setups that I know work, either STM32 based or since the chip shortage a few espresif or rp2040 based boards. If I need to output a clock for example, I can just bitbang it and when I need a more permanent circuit I just spin a board.
I find having about 100x 1/10/100/1k/10k and a bunch of electrolytic, ceramic caps (.1/1uf mostly), along with components for some common circuits (like an ldo and buck/boost). I also have a bunch of cheapo premade buck converters that I can use whenever I need voltage conversion.