I’ve come into the Rpi world very recently so very inexperienced in all of this, I’ve had similar experiences of flaky hotspot and WiFi. My solution was to stick a usb WiFi antenna in and disable the hotspot. No lost connections, always available. My setup is fixed so no need of hotspot, so for me this works. What I have found that don’t understand is what I’d describe as stalls or slow downs, at first I thought this was WiFi speeds but now I don’t think it is.
I’ve seen numerous screen shots with system monitor info, cpu mem etc on the right, so far not figured whether that’s a util or a system feature, what do people use to display this sort of info, as I’d like to see what’s going off when things grind to a halt.