For illustrations (not plots), I've been moved from Tikz- or Cetz-based to AI-generated and human-refined .svg figures. It is much more time effective and, while IA does all the design-related heavy tasks (colors, symbols, layout, etc.), I have freedom to use a desktop app (.e.g, inkscape) to input or rewrite the informative part of the illustrations.
Here, I will save the .svg for future reuse of refinements.