Practice and use focus peaking if your camera has it. Also, depth of field can be your friend.

Older cameras and lenses were designed for manual focus. Both in the view finders and in the giant lens focus rings with big rubber grips. Cameras were meant to be used manually before AF came along. It is an unfortunate fact of modern cameras that they are optimized and designed to be used as automatically as possible and only begrudgingly allow manual use anymore. People were good at the lost art of focusing in the manual SLR days because the cameras made it easy and people had plenty of practice at it.

The other problem in play is the modern philosophy of photography where sharpness of focus is seemingly even more important than composition. This is an expected artifact of the availability of finely focusing cameras among people who can’t really take a picture. So here we are.