If you're gonna do "thing happening in panel noises", why not just slap the romaji in there and call it a day?
Personally, I've always preferred the latter, since Japan has all their weird ideophones and onomatopoeia that are kinda fun to learn. I totally understand the desire to make things as readable as possible in English, but in my opinion "Jiiiiiiiiiii" is more interesting than "staaaare." Sure, English speakers won't always understand that Jiiiiiii is the ideophone for staring if they've never encountered it before, but what's going on is typically obvious from the panels anyway, and the sounds are just as arbitrary in Japanese as they are in English. Even a native Japanese speaker, if they've somehow never run into it before, is going to have to learn that "Jiiiiiiiiii" refers to staring. Once they've seen/heard it once or twice, then they know. If they never make the connection, then whatever, the ideophone doesn't actually relay any information, it's just there to be a weird sound for something which may or may not even be an actual sound to add some layer of flavor.
I've always thought it kinda silly how people translate arbitrary sounds like ideophones. Sure, you get to make all kind of "SFX: Menacing" jojokes, but that doesn't really add anything to the manga/anime itself. You can tell that something looks menacing from how it's being presented anyway, and thanks to the translation just saying what's going on instead of telling us what the sound is, we don't even know that it's supposed to be going "gogogogogo"
Maybe that's just me though. Probably a weird nitpick that only I have, and most casual readers that have a life outside reading manga would probably prefer "sfx:fluffy" over "fuwa-fuwa" even if it doesn't make any sense.