My paranoid workflow is that I have to make many subdivisions of the document so that I can trivially enable/disable components when I am triaging a problem. When something breaks, I am less reliant on the garbage error messages.

So the top-level document is just a long list of inputs

  \input{intro}
  \input{prelude}
  \input{complex_figure1}
  ...

The side benefit is that I can disable all but the component on which I am directly working, so compilation is faster.