Combinatorial patchworking: back from tropical geometry

We show that, once translated to the dual setting of convex triangulations of lattice polytopes, results and methods from previous tropical works by Arnal-Renaudineau-Shaw, Renaudineau-Shaw, Renaudineau-Rau-Shaw, and Jell-Rau-Shaw extend to non-convex triangulations. So, while the translation of Viro's patchworking method to the setting of tropical hypersurfaces has inspired several tremendous developments over the last two decades, we return to the the original polytope setting in order to generalize and simplify some results regarding the topology of $T$-submanifolds of real toric varieties.