Thermal pads are wonderful. Most of the time for moderate thermal loads, an exposed pad soldered to an internal ground plane running through the whole board is enough, as the copper layer there spreads out the heat well enough to dissipate. It always amazes me that an outer-layer copper fill is not much better than an inner-layer one, so the larger coverage of the inner layer wins every time.

A great app note on getting started with thermal design from TI: https://www.ti.com/lit/an/snva183b/snva183b.pdf