You can get very solid wireless in your house if you are willing to spend some money on it, and of course the time on the infrastructure. This means a network drop to each room, and very dense access points.
If you try to play games and avoid the "running wires to a room" part - you're just going to have a bad time. I don't see the "mesh wireless" stuff working long-term, they are simple stop-gaps. Once in the room though you can get away with wireless.
I recently just "made it rain" access points (ubiquity in this case) more or less so anywhere in the house you have or are very close to having line of sight to an AP. Since that transition wireless is as good as wired for me.
It's a bit more expensive, but also makes my quality of life far better. Everything just works. I also took the opportunity to get a quality PoE switch for the telco closet, a solid UPS, etc. Now my network survives power outages for 5-6 hours from a single UPS and switch, powering half a dozen APs throughout the house. Bonus is the PoE IP cameras also stay working during an outage.
In my experience it always worked well, was fairly fullproof, and had fast enough speeds that it was never an issue.
2 years ago I moved into a condo that has 25 wifi APs within range of me right now. Now I get it.
Getting one of the high-end tri-band routers as you said did help, but it's still a difficult experience.
But just the fact that the higher end routers handle the extra congestion much better was more the point.
I bought this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0167HG1V6
When I need raw speed (e.g, browsing/editing raw photos that are stored on a NAS) I still plug in. Even though the WiFi is rock solid, it's not as fast as wired.
Surely things haven't gotten this insane outside the iFruitbasket? If so I'm going to have to stock up on upgradeable refurbished laptops...
My kids' ChromeBooks don't have an Ethernet port. Good little Acer machines. School-issued CB, I have not been allowed to examine yet.