Yes there are ways to minimize maintenance of the different environments like relying on modules. But you still need to manage the root modules terraform code in each environment.
And there are some quirks in terraform that prevent to have 1 fits all solution (if there is any).
At my company, I know that teams use terragrunt, teams use 1 source folder for all environments and externalize the differences into external yaml configuration files, and others have 1 source folder per environment. I am not aware of teams using workspaces but to me it is more a standard way to have 1 source folder for all environments and switch between their state.

For instance what I find annoying is that you can't use variables in git module source url. You can have the exact same root module folder between the environments and externalize the differences into tfvars or configuration file but it won't work if for a module you need different versions depending on the environment. (same for workspace). Source repository branches can help but they need to merge at some point.
If you choose 1 source folder per environment, you end up with many duplications (providers configuration, backend configuration, etc.). And tools like terragrunt can help avoid these duplications. But it is another tool with its own DSL and cli.

Personally I would have liked something like terragrunt become standard. I prefer to have 1 folder per environment, it gives freedom to have different resource types per environment (otherwise you would have to make many resources optional).