+1 to learning a little bit of Vim, but I'd say buffers aren't necessary to get a passable experience. At least for casual SSH purposes.
Never been able to get the hang of tmux though. I know it's super powerful but I feel like in constantly fighting it. Though even just screen for keeping multiple console sessions alive at a time is super helpful even if I only use one at a time.
For me, getting value out of tmux required some significant overrides of the default configs, and knowing where to start was super daunting for me. From a HN post a few years back, I started installing the Noobs Term (https://noobs-term.com) defaults on any new system that I install. This suite of defaults does a lot of things, including installing nvim over vim, an opinionated zsh config with oh-my-zsh set of defaults and a quite nice tmux config, making it easy and reasonable to create new tabs and panes, swap between them and navigate around. With this, tmux quickly went from chore to pleasure to use.
I went with oh-my-tmux, and added a few plugins for copy-pasting in the buffer, and now I'm wishing I had that ability in my kitty term as well. I can hit a couple hot-keys and get quick copy/paste access to: git revisions, file paths, words, or any random start/stop letters on the screen. Using the plugins extrakto, tmux-copy-toolkit, and tmux-copycat.
Never been able to get the hang of tmux though. I know it's super powerful but I feel like in constantly fighting it. Though even just screen for keeping multiple console sessions alive at a time is super helpful even if I only use one at a time.