[mattkrause]

By these standards, are any citation managers adapted to modern use?

I’m definitely open to the idea that we should change how we refer to other findings, but EndNote, Zotero, and the like also can’t save you from new editions, overly-strict rules about reference formatting, and bad publisher-provided information.

If you can deviate slightly from a particular reference format, it’s fairly easy to emit either a DOI or a URL (but not both): https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/154864/biblatex-use-... One of the linked answers even suppresses DOI-like URLs.

[generationP]

The alternative is to just write the bibliography by hand. This means possibly having to make changes before final publication to adapt to the journal's style. But it is faster in my experience than getting things into bibtex pre-emptively, particularly as the latter doesn't reliably prevent problems at publication time. And it is sufficiently transparent that you don't have to deal with sneaky silent errors.

[BrandonS113]

I have never found a silent error. If bibtex is not happy, it complains loudly. I use the style files given by the publishers and it always comes out OK. Never had a publisher complain about the bibliography when using their styles, and they do check, and complain about a lot of things.

You must have really bad luck with bibtex.