I'd take a solid 300 baud connection over a spotty cellular connection during most emergencies.
Having worked and played on flaky high-latency and low-throughput networks much of my life, I mostly visualize things in my head—as you likely mean by 'command-line-and-editor-when-you-feel-every-byte-transmitted'. Open a connection and queue your commands; wait for output. It works if you don't make any typos.
Preferably, when the connection is too slow or flaky (bad cellular), I make a local script and echo the script to be executed remotely to a file on the remote server, and then execute it with nohup - with the input to create the script and execute it coming from a pre-made file on my local machine redirected to SSH.
Bad cellular often works in bursts, in my experience. Also, redirect output to a file if needed.
This works nicely in situations where your connection may drop frequently for periods exceeding timeouts. On that note, keep ssh timeouts high. With really spotty cellular you might have the network drop for 5-15 minutes between reliable transmissions. SSH connections can stay alive nearly indefinitely if the timeouts allow for it and IP address don't change.