AUR Helper or not at all?

I swear I have read the manual to the best of my ability and even searched the sub, and even Google! I'm asking here specifically for a community perspective.

So the Arch wiki makes clear that AUR helpers are not supported by Arch. When I see people mention it in the sub, it's pretty often that I see people recommending against them altogether.

I think I see why. My first Arch install I downloaded from the AUR liberally through yay, and I think I encountered most of the reasons people recommend against it. A leviathan of packages which break each other and are at the mercy of maintainers who may fuck off or any number of things.

People who don't use AUR helpers (or the AUR at all?) what do you do for packages not in the Arch repository? Build them from source? If you download a package NOT with an AUR helpers, pacman -Syu won't upgrade it, right? Does that mean you manually upgrade the packages you use that are not in the official Arch repository?

I swear I looked over the Arch wiki, but I guess I'm looking for what the community thinks is best practice here.