You will hear a million different answers to this question as all of us parent slightly differently and each child is different so I think the best thing to do is take on board what everyone has to say and do what sits best with you and your bub.

For my experience, your story sounds very familiar to me when my DD was 5 months, she went from being a brilliant self settler to a baby needing a feed to get to sleep. I believe in attached parenting and informed parenting so I did lots of reading about it and found the opposing ideas that 1. babies will never learn to self settle so you had better put a stop to it and 2. babies will be fine and self wean in their own time. I decided to just go with it.

However, it didn't work for me. After a while, I found feeding to sleep mucked up my DD's whole sleep routine as she became dependent on the breast to get back to sleep at all times. After a few weeks of feeding to sleep and much like a dummy dependency, DD would wake up each sleep cycle and cry hysterically for the boob to re-settle. I understood it to be very confusing for her in that she would drift off to sleep with a lovely boob in her mouth, content then wake up in the dark, 40 mins later alone and without the boob... it made sense that this was distressing and required high pitch crying to get the boob back again. This was while co-sleeping mind you! In the end I was getting no sleep as she was waking every 30-40 min, sucking for a few min, drifting off and doing that all again. In the day she would only nap for 30-40 min. Suffice to say we were all very sleep deprived. In the end, it took months of bad sleep and struggle before I decided to put an end to it and re-taught her to go to sleep without feeding to settle. Now, she can re-settle without the boob and finally sleeps through the night and naps properly during the day.

That said, if I have another, I would not necessarily avoid feeding to sleep, as I have read, and as previously posted by MantaRay it certainly works for some babies.

And on the question of them settling without you there, as mentioned:

My boys were able to fall asleep without me if I wasn't there, but if I was there they would want their feed.
we also never had a problem with DD settling for others.

HTH you to sort out what works for you guys!