Best way to organize lots of photos from scratch?

I remember our discussion (backed up by your reference!) You had a catastrophic death of your hard drive, and only "originals" were recoverable, and they are stored in apparently random folders.

As muguy suggested, I'd start a new empty Library by closing Photos and option-clicking the Photos icon. The you can choose "Create" and name the new Library. You may need to designate this as your System Library: go to Photos' Settins>General and Choose "Use as System Photos Library:"

That button is grayed out here, because this is already the System Library. You may want to connect to iCloud Photos if you have enough storage there available there.

Before, we talked about using Smart Albums to get started with organization. You can use a Smart Album to collect pictures you want to keep together. This one would get all the Jan '24 pictures:

Albums can go in Folders, so you might want monthly Albums inside of yearly Folders. Folders can go inside other Folders, so you might, like me, put the yearly folders into decade Folders. Every picture will have a place to go where it can be found later.

Unfortunately, Smart Folders do work on an iPhone. So if you want to sync your Photos Library with iCloud Photos and with iPhone Photos, you'll have to select all the pictures in each Smart Album and put them into ordinary albums using the Photos menu "File>New Album with Selection."

And, again repeating muguy, keep backups!

If your old library cannot be repaired, create a new one and organize as you would like (by year if fine). You will want to ensure that you have a Time Machine backup of your Mac and any external drive on which you keep your photos. You. can also sync through iCloud to all of your Apple devices but iCloud is not a backup per se.

Organized in what way?

Assuming that the exif data for date and time is correct, I would just import them all and use Photos tools to organize as necessary.