Dead bug is easy to do with through-hole components. Get some blank (copper-clad) PCB, glue ICs upside down (with their legs in the air), and solder things together directly. The PCB acts as a large ground plane and this works quite well for RF.
The Manhattan technique in the links you provided looks very tidy but also like a heck of a lot of work! Making a PCB really does not take very long, allows you to very easily use SMT components, which may be important if you're using ICs that don't come in DIP packages, makes a design completely repeatable, and looks a lot more professional. I admire people who build everything using these methods, but it's slow and fiddly.