What works for us and our previous child is cosleeping. After I saw both my partner and our eldest fall asleep simultaneously after finishing a feed I became a convert.
Also, it's a SIDS risk.
I think it's far better to do it deliberately, knowing where the baby is and deliberately positioning to avoid the possibility of rolling towards them, than to do it via exhaustion at 4am.
And our 3 year old coslept until 6 months and has slept 8pm to 8am in her own bed ever since so if that's counter productive I'll take it.
We noticed the same thing with my first 2 kids. They’d wake up from a dead sleep after putting them down. Once my second child was 3-4 months old we would let him cry for about 1 minute and found he usually went to back to sleep. Worked well. With my first we would run in immediately and I still think she has going to sleep issues.
If we only prescribed pain medication based on your definition, practically none of them would make it through.
Your body adapts to its environment and as such very few things will work in perpetuity.
I feel a great deal of confusion is stemming from that advice might come to late or to early in the childs life.