How to Restrict User Access by Table, Field, or Row in Airtable?

You might want to check out the miniExtensions Portal for this use case. It gives you full control over which data different types of users can access, all without giving them any access to Airtable at all. Essentially, they’d only see what you specifically want them to see. By default, they’ll also only see records that are related to them, but that can be changed, if needed, to let them see more records, for example based on specific filters.

Is there any way to implement real column-level permissions?
For viewing, Interfaces would be the way to go.  For editing, this is usually handled within the specific Interface where we set whether the column is editable or not:

Within the data layer you can also set field permissions:

Is there any way to implement true row-level permissions?

Visibility wise, yeah.  If you set up your data so that each record is linked to a user in some way via their email that gives you the ability to filter by the logged in user’s email:

To give them the ability to view a record without editing it you’d set every column in the Interface to not be editable

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Are interfaces the only recommended approach to hide fields and restrict access?
 

Hmm, as an Airtable native solution, yeah.  There are various third party portals that connect to Airtable that you can look into, such as Softr, Zite, Noloco etc that you can check out that might help if Airtable gets too pricey