I read that sk a long time ago and I understand it that way, that regex with wildcards are a bad idea, which makes sense from the parser performance point of view.
However, I thought that wildcards without regex are not so problematic and it is not worth migrating to regex (without wildcards).
But the OP says, TAC has advised them to do so. Your question, @Chris_Atkinson, sounds like avoiding wildcards is only important when ticking that regex check box.
So what is better from the performance perspective:
Wildcard without regex or regex without wildcard?