This is called “main sequence fitting”, and is the most generally-available method. There are many other methods which are usable in some circumstance or another, though: Many variable stars (not just Cepheids) can be determined from their periods; stars in clusters can be determined by any method of any star in the cluster, plus statistically from their proper motion (this is called the Moving Cluster method); there are other parallax methods available for some binary systems (especially if they’re resolvable or eclipse); and so on.
The Diamondback and the Wheelbarrow!
You must have a tiny house, or I must have done something wrong, because using the scale of basketball:Earth as a starting point I calculated the Moon to be a tennisball 7 meters away, the Sun to have a diameter of 26 m 2,8 km away, and Proxima Centauri to be twice the distance of the actual Moon.
As best I can recall the inner planets were much smaller and the basketball might have been Jupiter. And it just might have been Pluto (which was still considered a planet nack then) that was in Australia. I’d try to reconstruct the “system” I came up with back then (early 70’s) but I thought the comments were already a near hijack to the thread. It was mostly to suggest setting up some miniaturized analogy to the stars in the Little Dipper to be able to get a sense of how far apart and how far away they are from each other.
That constellation would be called the “Little Dips**t”
The stars of Ursa Minor have a spread of depth of 400 ly . If they were all at 50 ly, they’d be only a few ly apart… SO its more of a long chain … like a straight line … the bumps and wobbles in that chain would hardly be noticable.
Ground-based parallaxes are good out to about 300 ly. They can measure beyond that, but the error bars become largish. The Hiparchos spacecraft was meant to do a better job, and it did. But it had problems and its results were less good than expected. IIRC, it pushed out the well measured stars to 400-some ly, though. But only for relatively bright stars, as it had a fairly high limiting magnitude.
Its successor, the Gaia mission is expected to do much better. But it was just launched recently (last month, in fact), so it’s going to be a few years before we get any results.