anyone else find using meta tags for seo harder than the guides suggest?

The one meta tag that can genuinely hurt you is meta robots. A leftover noindex from a staging site or a plugin setting quietly keeps pages out of Google. Run your key pages through URL inspection in Search Console and it'll tell you if one is set.

Partly because the guides oversell them. The keywords meta tag does nothing on Google at all, so skip it. The meta description doesn't affect rankings either - it is there to get the click - and Google rewrites it a lot of the time based on the search. Titles are the one that really matters, and even those get rewritten when Google thinks they don't match the page. So: a title that describes the page plainly with the main keyword near the front, short enough not to get cut off, and a description that reads like a reason to click. Don't sweat it beyond that.