Common/best practice for setting lots of UI (Text) Fields

Getting Started
1

What’s the best practice for setting UI (especially Text) fields by script? By that I mean, I know you can set it like this:

public TMP_Text my_text;

void Update(){
    my_text.text = 'hello world';
}

However I don’t see that scaling up to more than a dozen or so strings before it becomes a maintenance nightmare.
I considered a dictioary: Dictionary<string, TMP_Text> text_fields; - but that’s not serializable which presents its own set of problems in regards to populating it. The advantage of a dictionary is that the text can then be easily set with a generic method:

void SetText(string key, string new_text){
   text_fields[key] = new_text;
}

Is there a better way to do this? How do folks normally do this? Googling around only found tutorials for complete beginners with the first way.

Thanks

2

If they all have same parent and their index wont change you can use simple single-dimensional array of TMP_Text (index in array would be same as child index/sibling index.)