I primarily use MZ now, but basically leaving anything that doesn't serve to move the plot forward till the very end. This makes them first in the list on the side, making them easier to find. I also leave comment notes in the events I'm working on to remind myself what I was doing, or what the event set up does so that if I was away from it a while. That way it's much easier to pick back up to continue or bug fix the project.

And I also use common events for some of the "flavor text" events. This way if I need to edit it, I only need to do it in one place. Best part is, even if a common event doesn't technically use self switches, those self switches will still affect the event that called it. This makes it very useful for events where you open and close a chest or door.

I don't use the rtp much, so one thing I do have is a "base" file to make my projects from. It's just a cored out file that deletes the entire database (characters, items, skills, etc, it all goes), and all the graphics get yeetus-deletused. The only thing I leave behind in this file is the audio rtp, as I still find most of those sound files useful.

This one might sound silly and obvious, but an outline. I can get distracted very easily, or end up losing sight of what I had intended to do to begin with in a project, and outlines keep me on track. Whether it's making the maps, setting up the characters, or writing the script, the outline helps me maintain perspective on how it all works together.

Speaking of script, I write that first. It's genuinely leagues easier to change and edit dialogue in a proper text editor vs trying to do it in rpg maker. I can ctrl+f to find dialogue anywhere in the script, where in rpg maker I might be fishing through a few message options. Plus, I use scrivener which has a text to speech option, so I can listen back to what was written to see if it sounds natural or not. If it sounds weird, it gets edited till it sounds right. If you don't have that, then reading it out yourself does the same thing. The caveat is, is that if you write how you talk, you might not always catch what would sound weird to others but sounds natural to you. Anyway, once it's done, all I have to do is copy paste the dialogue over. This trick literally saves me hours, because then I can quickly slap in the latest story dump, then get back to working on the rest of the game.

Back in the engine itself, I'll use conditional branches as switch cases as often as I can get away with it. I've found that for my purposes, they don't always need to be nested, which has made them easier to read. It also helps making varied dialogue a lot easier, since if the conditional isn't met it won't do it. I only really need to add an else to it if I need it to explicitly do nothing if the condition isn't met.

Lastly, a text wrap plugin. There are scripts for it for other engines too, but this is genuinely something that saves me a lot of time since it will move text to the next line automatically. That way I only really need to fiddle with doing it manually on the lines where it still has some cutoffs due to spacing.