That is another way. Having a shift register allows you to have quite a lot of strips connected to your chip, for the "cost" of three pins in total, more or less regardless of how many different strips you want to drive.
If you only want to drive one strip, though, a suitable transistor/MOSFET is a better choice, as you can adapt the schematics to your power requirements.
And make sure you connect the mosfet the right way so it doesn't "kinda" work and make you think your code is bad. Not that anyone has ever done that ever.