Category Pages vs Custom Page Templates

Hi everyone, apologies if this has been asked before but I would like to know the preferred way of assigning categories to be displayed on a page.

I’m using wordpress as a sort of cms and have found 2 ways to do it. Firstly by assigning each category to a menu item, so that the archives are displayed. Works great and will be easy to update in the future, BUT I can’t seem to get rid of the https://www.mysite.co.uk/category/post-title no matter what settings I use in permalinks.

The second way I’ve had it working is to modify the loop to pull only the posts with the particular category. But when I do it this was it becomes really hard to identify the page by using the global $pagename.

Sorry if this is all jumbled up, any comments are welcome!