Your not going to get clear answers online, no one has your system room or ears.
The best thing to do with phono stages is to listen to them yourself and have two at a time to compare.
If your buying used at a fair price you can always resell the one you felt didn't make the cut.
I'll generalize with what I have found in time period and evolution.
Generally Receivers, Integrated amp and Separates components fall in that pecking order as to a brands line of equipment quality. A receiver will always have more compromise than a separate preamp and power amp, this is true if new or old.
In the 60s 70s and the first half of the 80s, most people played records, it was a primary source. With that understanding, even lower end equipment, and receivers would try to make their phono stage sound good. If a stand alone MM phono stage was built in the 60s and early 70s it would need to compete with already good sounding stages built into the equipment then. During this earlier time MC cartridges started to show up, so stand alone step up transformers started to be added inline to accommodate these cartridges.
By the late 70s and mid 80s more MC cartridges where on the market, so some of the better equipment started to build in a step up transformer with the phono stage in their equipment line. You will see both MM Phono and MC Phono inputs on these integrated and separates. Some of these units might have even taken it further, a TOTL mid 80s preamp might have an adjustable built in phono stage where you could adjust loading and gain for your MC cartridge.
By the late 80s, 90s and 2000, most mass market units started to drop the phono stage entirely. Some early AVRs might have put a phono stage in their unit because people still had their records and tables, so it could be a selling point. However phono stages like this are more of an after thought and just in case someone needed it.
When records started to gain in popularity again in the mid 2000s people needed a way to play them on their home AVR TV system. So many stand alone RIAA phono stages came out that you could plug into the AUX input of your AVR. You could get any price point here and in reality the masses don't know the sound quality of records anymore like in the 70s. They no longer had a reference point or anything else to compare it to, it just had to play.
Today we have all these decades to buy from, we can buy a new cheap stand alone RIAA phono stage for $250-$300. We can buy a old Stereo Preamp or integrated amp from the 80s that has built in MM & MC phono staging, or an 80s stand alone. We can but a brand new adjustable stand alone stage from $500- $10,000.
In my opinion the very late 70s and through the 80s to early 90s is the sweet spot for vinyl playback used equipment. You can get phono staging, stand alone or built in for $200- $400 that would cost you $2000+ today for the same sound quality. This was the pinnacle of vinyl playback and had very discerning people that had all the prior years as a reference point to judge from. Much of the cheaper stand alone staging is just like and in many cases the same built equipment of the 2000s. This is the mentality, lets just get it to work for them, they don't know or have a reference point anyway.
For instance here is a Forte Audio Model 2, it's a stereo preamp with a adjustable phono stage for MM & MC. I also has a stand alone power supply so it's just got many nice sound quality building added to it. It would make a nice start to a system by adding a power amp, but also can just be added to a system to use the phono stage. This one cost me $45, but they sell for more, $400 and under, but I would say to get this staging in a new RIAA stand alone it might cost you $1000-$1500 or more.
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Here is a Sansui CA-F1 stereo preamp, again would make a nice start to a system, or use it for the phono stage only, these go for around $350.
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This is just to point out you can use a stereo preamp as a stand alone stage
