My 32 inch 4K panel was showing 6 empty slots on the right side with 47 tiles, and it drove me nuts for weeks. The thing is, auto-fit is doing its job, it just fills as many tracks as fit the width, and it has no clue how many items you have or that 5 columns looks dumb when the last row holds 2 cards. You can keep the responsive flow and kill the stretch by setting the track max to something like 320px and adding a max-width on the grid wrapper so the extra space becomes outside margin instead of fat cards. That gets you the same clean look you have now, but it still drops to 2 columns on a tablet without you writing a single media query. Fixed 3 columns works fine until someone opens your site on a phone or a 13 inch laptop, then those cards get skinny and the text breaks bad. So we do not really disagree on the goal, I just think you can have the layout you want without locking the column count.

Taking this further, the clamping side is really just the start of it. Once your vise is dialed in and repeatable, you can actually trust your offsets, which means you stop chasing your tail every time you swap parts. That confidence lets you push feeds and speeds instead of backing off to play it safe, and that is where cycle time and tool life gains come from too. The shops I have seen that live and die by setup sheets and torque specs do not just have lower scrap, they run faster because nobody is second guessing the setup. It all snowballs once you treat workholding like the foundation it is instead of an afterthought.