So for the better part of two decades, I’ve been copying my public keys via the local computer’s clipboard and hoping that copy and paste doesn’t clobber some essential character or line ending.

I have just yesterday learned about ssh-copy-id which sets up your ssh keys with the requested server.

The usage is pretty much what you would expect from an ssh command line tool:
ssh-copy-id [-h|-?|-n] [-i [identity_file]] [-p port] [[-o <ssh -o options>] …] [user@]hostname

for me this looks like:
ssh-copy-id FatherNerd@192.168.1.2

Some days you are the clipboard, some days the editor.

:wq