When I got solar panels for my (former) house 15 years ago, as I recall, the best practice was to have panels in parallel (each with its own microinverter) and not in serial as serial would cause loss of efficiency when there was partial blockage of panels. (I could be misremembering all of this).
That's only relevant if you're so starved for panel area that you can't put them into places that have each sub array sufficiently homogeneous and only partially shaded during sunrise/sunset.
you might be misremembering bypass diodes?
No, microinverters are still a thing (Enphase is a popular brand) and they do then get connected in parallel.
There are also power optimizers which are DC-DC and connected in series.