i unironically always end up adding Tom’s simple storage mod to my vanilla+ modpacks, and it’s always much better than vanilla. Even better than huge unwieldy and expensive and slow storage systems that take hours or days to build. It’s one convenience I always use, because otherwise I will quickly abandon a world. What it does is add an AE2-style interface to just a bunch of chests that are next to each other, plus a few other things. You’re still storing things in chests, but it gives you a clean look at all of them at once, instead of having to dig through dozens or hundreds of them.

(my 1.21.10 world doesn’t have the mod installed yet, but I only started a few days ago and so far the amount of items is still okay. But eventually I can’t help myself, I cannot manually sort items, I’m just not built for it, and automatic sorting is excruciatingly slow, and item retrieval in big storage systems is also very slow when you need to run back and forth just to grab a few different items. Plus traditional redstone-based sorters break when you quit the game while they’re sorting.)