It sounds like you are un-grouping, rather than suspending grouping to modify the nested elements.
Personally, I think the AC method is great, with nested grouping indicated by color-coded nodes to prevent ungrouping deeper objects, and with the enable/suspend grouping toggle to permit treating grouped elements as if they were ungrouped.
Cheers,
Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier • macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB