But performance often matters, so you trade off precision for performance. I think people are wrong to dismiss floating point numbers in favor of fixed point arithmetic, and I've seen plenty of fixed point arithmetic that has failed spectacularly because people think if you use it, it magically solves all your problems...

Whatever approach you take other than going all in with arbitrary precision fractions, you will need to have a good fundamental understanding of your representation and its trade-offs. For me personally I use floating point binary and adjust the decimal point so I can exactly represent any value to 6 decimal places. It's a good trade-off between performance, flexibility, and precision.

It's also what the main Bitcoin implementation uses.