International seo related issues

I’m watching the video tutorial international seo in yoast academy. in this course, yoast experts explain that example.com/es/, which is a subdirectory of web pages in Spanish, brings more seo results than es.example.com, which is a subdirectory of web pages in Spanish. example.com/es/, which is a Spanish subdirectory for web pages, is more effective than es.example.com.
In layman’s terms: if you want to rank high in different countries for different language versions of a website and get a lot of traffic, example.com/es/ is better than es.example.com. The above is the opinion of yoast seo experts.
But what I have seen in reality is that it seems that domain setup like es.example.com can get the page ranked high in different countries.
I don’t know exactly which domain setup is more effective for internationalized seo for web pages. Can wpml support experts please help me, is the way of setting up subdomain name or setting up subfolder better?