I use a personally-adjusted variant of M-x shell for most of my last 20 years of Emacs use (after trying various hacks including things mentioned in this article). I end up having about 20–100 named shell buffers on each machine, different projects, logs, etc, and I keep all histories of each shell in separate history files. It helps that the buffers are practically infinte size and I can use standard Emacs editing for anything, plus comint, which is a great simple interface to shells. I have some tools to split the Emacs frame into multiple pieces and reorganize them quickly so I can see any number of my open shells, limited only by the monitor size. I dont understand how people live without such shell management solutions; I’ve seen expert tmux users struggle with keeping track of all shells, whereas Emacs has tons of tools to work on buffers that directly work: starting from simple ibuffer, bookmarks, previews, to multi-occur (which can specialize to shells or subsets of them), to whatever you wish to do with buffers really.

btop/htop/nvtop or other curses-heavy tools have specialized solutions (open vterm or eat and run it), but all the composing unix tools run in M-x shell.