Auto exposure isn’t “pointless” it’s just an attempt (albeit sometimes poor) of the engine to mimic human eye behavior.
You need to chase around based on what your end goal is. There’s no substitute for it. Nor will you find a template that just does what you need since what you need could be just about anything.
Indoor archviz means absolutely nothing.
It’s like if you just asked us to tell you what color you would pick to paint your room…
Are you going to bake light or use ray trace?
And are you aware of what you would actually have to do to get a proper bake?
Does real sun angle matter in your projects (interiors still have external light coming in from windows that change based on facing/lat/lon/time of day/Julian calendar etc)?
Does the scene need to run at runtime, or do you just need to take screen-shots?
There’s probably another 20 questions that would narrow down a little on what you actually have to do to get to your end product, but let’s start with those and see…