I use https://www.chezmoi.io/, which deals with that with templates and/or scripts. It's very flexible, so it can feel overkill, but I'm very fond of it.

I use https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm, which works smoothly and includes support for host-specific files

Some application configuration does not allow host name resolution. In this case a symlink to a host-specific config file is used. Like, for `kitty` I make a `<hostname>.conf` for each host on which I have an account and then make a local, per account symlink to a literal `local.conf` included from `kitty.conf`. This same pattern is useful in configs that do allow dynamic host name resolution as it robust against cases where the host name unexpectedly changes.

All dot files are distributed via `vcsh` with the remote `git` repo in a personal `gitea` instance.

I've used many different methods but none of them stuck until I started using https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager