Character Controllers vs Rigidbody in a 2D fashion

Hey,

I'm heard that it's general consensus that Character Controllers are expensive, and having too many object using them is bad practice. In my case, I use them for my player and AI characters in my 2D sidescroller, but I haven't really run into any issue yet as I've only been using one other AI character.

I'm planning to have a large amount of moving sprites in a scene, and I'm wondering now: what is the alternative to the character controller?

Rigidbodies with forces seems kind of unnecessary, because it's not really a physics gamed game at all. Is Rigidbody.MovePosition a bad idea? Or how is just straight-up transform.Translate? Any solution providing the same movement with lesser performance cramp is welcome.

Thanks in advance