I'm trying to manage my projects mostly like the steps the OP takes. The only thing that I would add, which has helped me is, is having build automation in place as well (CI/CD or just scripts like a Makefile).

This could fall under tests, but I've found that having concrete steps written down on how to build the thing helps. As there's many times something that's easy to forget that has to happen for things build correctly if I've stepped away from the project for a while.