@kevincox For light tasks, I will make use of either vterm (if I'm in Emacs) or Alacritty (if I'm not).
If I need to get down to serious work (such as working on shells and text files both locally and remotely), I'll jump into eshell, using TRAMP when I need to go remote or sudo (or both) to edit files. I'll still use vterm if I need something that does screen redrawing, such as apt.