When I transitioned to Joomla 4 I needed to figure out an alternative to JoomSEF, as you all did. Here is what I ended up doing:

1. Change all article aliases to match what you want the SEF URL to be (e.g., pizzeria-uno).
2. Change all category aliases to match what you want the SEF URL to be (e.g., chicago-dining).
3. Install Route66 plugin.
4. In Route 66 settings, configure article URLs to be {articleAlias}, and category URLs to be {categoryAlias}.

Worked well for me, though it did require manually changing to the appropriate alias on articles and categories, which took some time.

We are also waiting for a JoomSEF update for Joomla 4 compatibility!
Spring 2022 is almost over in about 9 days!