Its only madness if you make it so. Some look at turntable geometry and drive themselves crazy trying to optimize every tiny little thing from an engineering/geometry point of view. Long arm, tangential arm, this protractor, that protractor. Its real easy to spend more time aligning than listening, and more money on setup than the rig itself.
Or you can take the sane approach, recognize no matter what you do its never gonna be perfect. But it will sound absolutely awesome nonetheless!
Then you realize this is just as likely whether you download and print a jig for free, or pay thousands for all the gizmo's. The cartridge can be properly aligned every bit as good with paper, eyeballs, and a $20 Shure stylus force gauge. I am not kidding. Look at my rig.
https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/8367 My first table was a Basis with the Graham arm. The Graham is fairly unique in that it has a detachable armwand with a jig that is used to align the cartridge, eliminating all the protractor steps. Its why I bought it, because so many people had succeeded in brainwashing me into thinking how hard this all is. Its not. Its simple.
If you print one of the free downloads just be sure and place the paper on a used record. That way your alignment will be done at the same level as when playing a record. Which is the primary benefit of the MoFi Disk, its designed to emulate a record, only one with the geometry marked right on it.
But whatever. Point is you go through all the same few simple steps no matter what. Also no matter what you do the arm swings through an arc while playing every record. No matter how perfectly you sweat the precision its only precise at two points across the whole record. So why sweat it? If you are off by some tiny fraction of a millimeter all that means is the two places where its perfect are shifted a little one way or another.
I can totally get that its hard being new to hear something like this. You got a slew of people repeating the same old same old, and its quite a bit different than this. Well, get used to it. There's a whole lot of stuff people repeat over and over and over again. Repeating the same wrong stuff over and over again doesn't ever make it true. Go and listen. You will see.
