The Google Groups webface is also getting good enough that you can keep up with some lists without having to actually subscribe to them via email.

Speaking as a non-technical person at Stripe, the google groups web interface good, but not great. Andreas on our team built a filter manager, which makes it much easier: https://github.com/antifuchs/gmail-britta

I was all set up with filters on my first day and then made tweaks over my first couple of weeks to improve efficiency.

Do you create filter "roles", so certain roles have default filter sets upon creation?

We don't. People end up choosing the various lists they want to be on, so it wouldn't make much sense to do so.