Haven't had to fine-tune much, but this matches what I've seen with teams doing it. The version management alone is a nightmare. Prompt engineering forces you to actually understand what you're asking the model to do, which usually surfaces the real problem faster.
That said, fine-tuning makes sense if you're doing something genuinely novel or your domain has strong linguistic patterns competitors can't just prompt their way into. Support tickets though. Yeah, better ROI just iterating on prompts and maybe some retrieval augmentation. Did you try RAG before bailing on fine-tuning.