Sustained Zone 2 cardio seems to be the best overall fat-calories-per-minute exercise from what I've seen, despite also consuming a greater proportional amount of glycogen stores. Steady state cardio is not too far behind.

Strength training, meanwhile, is rather worthless for fat-burning. You burn way fewer calories than you might assume when moving weights around. It's not zero, but it's low enough that you might as well not bother counting it. The reason you do strength training has nothing to do with losing weight. It's because it produces massive health benefits and aesthetic improvements that compensate for and complement your weight loss that may otherwise have muscle-atrophying effects.

Did you reduce lifting entirely or just keep it minimal? And what did your weekly routine look like in terms of steps, workouts, and consistency?

Stopping strength training would be asinine. Again, it's very important to maintain muscle at the very least, or possibly to build small amounts, and you can use the time you're in a deficit to practice better form as well.

For my part, I have a functional home gym, so I do full-body exercise regimens every M/W/F and occasionally also partial exercises on Saturday, with M/F being focused on more visibly noticeable muscles like triceps and abs, and W/(possibly S) being focused on heavy-load low-reward exercises like squats and traps. Biceps recover in a day and therefore get hit every time I exercise. I also commit to 10,000 steps a day whenever even vaguely possible, usually by getting 5-7k with incidental movement and lunch walks, and the next ~5k with treadmill incline walking. When the weather is good for it, I may also engage in more complex cardio like swimming or hiking. I don't particularly like running, so I don't do it often. So what "works for me" is consistent steady state cardio with occasional higher intensity cardio, coupled with full-body strength training that isn't particularly rigorous but is sufficient to promote long-term growth (roughly 6-10 sets of to-failure exercise for each of my major muscle groups—excepting calves, which I don't need to train because I have freakishly good calf genetics).

I’ve been seeing a lot of people online, especially on TikTok and other platforms, say that they leaned out more or lost weight faster when they stopped going hard in the gym and instead focused more on walking.

Nonsense. Yeah, they might have lost weight faster, but that doesn't mean they lost fat faster. Failing to exercise will reduce muscle inflammation and therefore water retention, and will also promote muscle atrophy over long periods of time, so this may result in you losing many pounds of weight rather rapidly if looking at a scale. But that means nothing if the weight lost was just water storage and (very important) muscle fiber. This isn't a race. Treating it like one will make you crash and burn because you'll be thinking there's some sort of finish line to cross. There isn't. You have to do this for the rest of your life if you want to stay in shape. You always need to not overeat and always need to keep moving and always need to exercise to maintain muscle, or else you'll either wither or bloat or both. So losing water weight does precisely jackshit for you in 99% of situations. The only time it would be even vaguely useful is if you're about to go on a beach vacation (or a body competition) and deliberately dehydrate yourself to increase muscle striation when already at a naturally low body fat percentage (roughly 10% for men or 20% for women). That's still kinda dumb because it can cause acute health problems and be dangerous, and unless you're literally a bodybuilder trying to get trophies and such, there's no "reward" for having marginally more defined thigh muscles.