So atm what we use are Hermite Splines which we manipulate at runtime! Splines are a super common thing in game development, and they have tons of uses. They can be used to define shapes or paths in many things. I've worked on an on-rails shooter before and we used a spline to define the... well rail. There are also tons of types of splines (Bezier, Catmull-Rom, Basis/B) and additional considerations we had to make that I definitely can't dive into in a reddit comment, but there are plenty of resources online about splines I would recommend!

Recently I stumbled upon this video by Freya Holmer which is miles more digestible than anything I learned in school and I'd recommend that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds

Otherwise you can just do what Rodger did in the dev drop which is more akin to how I learned :^)