How do I manually manage iPhone playlists in Ventura?

Background: I recently got a new Mac Mini and went from Mojave/iTunes to Ventura/Music app with my iPhone 12.

I don't use Apple Music to buy music at all. My previous iTunes setup was perfect.

I buy lossless music (usually .flac) from various non-streaming, non-sync-ing, non-Apple outlets for work, and need/want to keep them on my Macs in lossless format. I convert these files to mp3 for phone listening and in Mojave/iTunes made playlists on my phone and transferred these mp3s to a relevant playlist. All manual, no sync. I'd then sort the playlist on the phone by date added, save to play order, delete the (now redundant) mp3s on my Mac and be happy. What I wanted was in the right playlist, in the right order on my phone and nowhere else.

Now I'm trying to do the same thing in the Music app included with Ventura and pulling my hair out. I have sync disabled, manually manage music enabled, but it seems the best/only thing I can do is make playlists in the Music app and drag these onto the iphone/device. 2 problems > 1. deleting the now-redundant mp3s on my Mac means that the next time I drop an updated version of an existing playlist to a device, that the mp3s that are no longer on my Mac are deleted from the device. If I'm not syncing and managing music manually, why do the contents of my device need to rely on what's on my Mac?? 2. No sort by date available. In a playlist that might necessarily grow to 200+ tracks. Ugh.

I can see an apparently pointless list of music files on a device in its Finder window but....so? Why's that even there? I'm really hoping there's some big AHA lightbulb waiting for me and it's not really all the messy pile of hot garbage it seems to be.

If these things aren't possible using the Mac-included apps I'm more than happy to look at paid alternatives.