This is what I do as well, but it’s laborious and error prone.
I really think that one of Hugos strength is it’s stricter content and layout paradigm. But at the same time it isn’t immediately intuitive and can lead to a lot of frustration when trying to create pages and hook them into the correct templates.
I imagine most new Hugo users can relate to the process of randomly moving and renaming markdown and layout files until you find a ‘match’. Even after you’ve got it working, you are most likely still baffled by the magic of the templating system and quickly tell yourself "next time i’ll figure it out properly’
More developer tools to surface the lookup order and how different content structures map to the layouts would be a huge win for Hugo.