I use Torii because Anki never worked for me. I don’t even know why it didn’t work (I tried several times) or why Torii works for me though. I use a mix of phrases or just vocabulary. Whole sentences are a bit too much for me personally when it comes to doing reviews.
I usually only do five vocab lessons a day + plus vocab I encountered while reading something. If I read more/just encounter more than 5 new words while reading I don’t do new lessons. I feel overwhelmed fairly easily.
I also feel like it would just make me memorize a sentence which seems a bit useless to me. I’d rather focus on learning vocabulary and grammar and then trying to read texts/books to be able to read sentences instead of memorizing certain sentences. If I want vocab to stick better I usually write an example sentence for it and look up a few other sentences (for example on tatoeba) to get a feeling for it.
I use one big deck because my focus is to broaden my vocabulary in general. But I have a few smaller decks (that I don’t work on often) for when I need to brush up my knowledge in a certain area.
I don’t think you’ll ever find an ultimate guide for learning anything when it comes to languages. Everyone has different learning preferences, a different amount of time, different goals etc. A big part of learning a language is learning how to learn a language especially if you learn a new language for the first time (for yourself).