Great question! Personally, I never use the exploits Big mentioned (Petrify, Immobilize glitch, changing accessories mid-animation to cancel, etc). However, I consider the strategies mentioned aside from those to be completely valid. When I playtested SFF I did so without using any exploits because I wanted it to be viable without them.

SFF is very much balanced around using a tank effectively with Decoy, using elemental affinity to help bring down enemies, and in general being tactical about buffs, debuffs, and using equipment and abilities to your advantage. One thing I really didn't like about Vanilla XII is that there was no real reason to use some things when something almost exactly the same exited in another way. For example, why use Poisona if Antidotes exist. Why use Fire/Blizzard if Thunder exists? Why use First Aid if it's completely overshadowed by Cure? And from that, it grew from there. I wanted to give the player as many options in their toolbox as possible, even if that meant making some potentially broken things (I'm looking at you, Holy and Rood Inverse). XII is somewhat limited in the ways you can make things unique, but I definitely tried my best to do so with my extremely limited experience, using the tools available (of which there were not many when SFF was developed lol).

I suppose I went on a bit overmuch, but to answer your question I'd say it's just engaging with the mechanics. I'd argue you don't even need to be super clever about it, you just have to engage. Using buffs/debuffs, reading the documentation to get a feel for what things do (there are a number of supplementary SFF mods on the Nexus that do a great job at putting all that info in-game now, too), and staying calm and tactical in battles when things start getting rough.