I use a $20 digital iron from Ali for home and a Weller at work. Both do the job exact same job, except the cheapie doesn't have a timer shutdown. The 240V cable to the $20 iron is a tad too rigid as well. Might replace it at some point.
I am personally digging the 900M-T-LB tip. Can get into tight spots but still sustains enough heat to do most through-hole.
From what I've found, you can solder pretty most things with a variety of tips, but couldn't work without the following:
-good lighting
-no-clean flux pen
-solder wick
-good tweezers
-eye loup
With those things you could probably still use a soldering iron with a tip the size of a butter knife and get a way with it.
The general process I use is to tack a few legs in place, add an excess amount of solder to each side of legs on an IC, then flux it and drag the solder along. Take off the excess with wick, do the whole board - then clean with iso and visually check. It's much easier to see the quality of a join when flux isn't doing weird stuff to the light. If the soldering looks messy/dull/gluggy it's easy to dab the flux pen around and redistribute the solder by continuously cleaning the tip and then dragging it between 2 or more points.
I'd really recommend getting a cheapo electric hot-air station -
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Domesti ... 33841.html .
Everything from MSSOPs, resistors and caps to 0.4mm pitch QFN/DFNs will reliably solder just by tinning the pads and dropping the chip on. Solder
paste is handy though if you have it! The trick is to keep the chip on the fringe of the hot air while heating the pads before you drop it on so you don't get cold/bad joints.. a few taps with the tweezers and then let the surface tension align things. Just a bit of practice to get the timing right
cook it too long and the flux will dry up.. wick it, back to square one.
The heat plate linked by eatyourguitar could possibly be handy in combination with hot air. For e.g. tin/flux-pen all the pads, use the plate to keep the board at 120degrees or so, and then use the hot air with one hand while you drop chips with the other. It could just be worth getting a stencil and hand pasting, then using the hot plate to solder everything. Holla if you need any tips there. I've got a few shortcuts in that area that make life a bit easier.