There's lots of good drogue threads on the forum to read through. Like a lot of things in rocketry, there's no shortage of opinions
What I do with my JLCR is attach the drogue midway between nose cone and body tube. Then the JLCR and Main attach directly to the nose cone, this has the side effect of making it easy to turn the JLCR on because i just have to pull the nose cone out a few inches, hit the button, and put it back. Last weekend I did a drogue-less deployment where the setup was identical but no drogue parachute. Worked fine.
I'm of the _opinion_ the main purpose of the drogue is to stabilize things on the way down. On my 4" cardboard DX3, once the propellant mass is gone, and the nose cone separates, it basically fin stalls and falls horizontally nice and slow. The drogue chute (12") puts the falling airframe in a very shallow upside down V orientation. That, in my opinion, is the best orientation coming down in prep for main deployment. I also have a 4" fiberglass build I did for an L3 certification and the orientation on descent was the same. The descent rate was a little faster because it's heavier but it was still setup very well for main deployment.
PS another note about that 4" cardboard dx3 (i love that kit btw and highly suggest it). On my first L1 attempt, my youngest son disconnected the shock cord while i was prepping because he was "helping"
The body tube floated down horizontally and landed with no damage. Obviously I didn't get the cert, but i was surprised how slow it fell, it seemed to float down. Fat body tubes falling horizontally produce significant drag and fall very slowly.