Setting joint positions without using a PID Controller

I have created a four-wheeled vehicle in sdf format and want to simulate its motion by providing the desired angles to joints. I have been looking up ways to do this.

First thing I found was Joint::SetAngle but it has been deprecated. Next I tried, Joint::SetPosition and also, JointController::SetJointPosition. In both the cases, the wheels would rotate as desired but they wouldn't make the vehicle move. It seemed to be slipping on the ground, but I don't think the problem was with the friction parameters as I tried increasing mu and mu2 values to no avail, and also the model worked perfectly using Joint::SetVelocity.

I looked up this website and found that on many of the questions, a PID controller to apply force on the model was recommended, which indeed works. However, the problem is that my end-goal is to simulate a complex robot structure which will have many revolute joints (one for each motor). Therefore, PID tuning for each joint will be time-consuming and quite frankly, annoying. So is there a safe alternative to using a PID tuner? TLDR: SetAngle is deprecated, SetJointPosition makes wheels rotate but model doesn't move. Looking for alternatives to PID Controller, as PID Tuning can be time-consuming and erroneous