Best Solution to create audit/change logs

I don't really think there's much difference in the set up between automations and pipelines but let me explain how I do audit log changes.  

I create a single table to hold all the audit logs. The fields will be the table name, the field name, the old value and the new value and the user who made the change.  

I then have the pipeline trigger say any of a list of 10 fields change on the parent table which needs to be tracked.  I then have the pipeline have say 10 steps in it to write out the name of the table, the field name, the old value, and the new value (there is syntax to get the old value),  and the last modified by,  into this child audit log table.  I also write out the key field or the Record ID field of the parent table which had to change.  

OK, now we just put an embedded report on the parent table of all the audit log records where there was no change between the old value and the new value. Then of course 90% of the records in that table will have no change and we don't need those so part of the process of writing out those records could be to scan those records looking for that situation and deleting them or else running overnight purge to delete all of the records very efficiently where the old value in the new value is the same.