Best practices for events and event data in a GA custom pixel?

It really depends on what you are doing analytics wise. Most tags only want the start event with the modest data. The other touches Google and others may want as “interacted with” shipping, payments and finally purchase.

all of the extra interactions between “begin and purchase” could never get interactions in the case where logged-in or shop-pay, etc… which would not trigger them at all and “skip over” them

It really just depends on what you want to report on your checkout funnel.