Simplest workflow for Android Emulated debugging

I have already deployed our application to the iOS App store. Using the cordova pipeline and debugging/deploying through Xcode was a breeze.

It has been the complete opposite experience with trying to deploy to Android. After a few hours of setting and resetting environment variables, AVDs, SDKs, and the rest of the alphabet soup, I am out of ideas.

I have followed the ionic documentation exactly in setting up my Android environment multiple times. What is the simplest way to set this up?