fstab and lots of external drives question

I'm on Ubuntu 22.04 and using it for a lot of video/audio projects. That's resulted in, over time, the accumulation of a lot of drives. Since I often have dormant projects mixed with active as well as archived ones, my drives are not always plugged in. Until now I've just used my Dolphin file manager to mount a drive by simply clicking it. With a bunch of drives, though, it can get to be a nuisance.

What I'd like is to have the system, when booting, auto-mount whatever drives are plugged in (and ignore any not plugged in). I'm assuming this might be accomplished by listing the drives in fstab and that it may be time to start entering all of them but have a question(s).

Is fstab a good way to handle a situation like this?
The listing of drives in fstab could get quite long, not industrial-scale long, but long. Is that bad?
Could someone post an example of current syntax for this kind of listing? (Searching turned up some confusion for me about a 'nofail' option and reference to a newer way to list options.Some of the answers I found went back a couple of decades.)

Obviously, if there's a wholly different way to deal with this, I'd love to hear about it.

thanks,
BabaG