It's something we only started fairly recently, so we're not certain yet whether it'll work out long term. Before we started it we'd also just not play, but we'd try to still have as many players over as possible so we could hang out and maybe watch a movie

I'm playing in a 5e Beyond the Witchlight campaign, and running a Tiny Taverns game on nights when we have missing players. It's been working out really well for us, because we're all invested enough in the BtW game that we don't want to run when we have missing players, and Tiny Taverns is episodic by design.