Tomato Plants wilting, shriveling, and dying

[DingoBells]

Hello! I'm new here, and after trying to revive my tomato plants to no avail I have decided to seek help from others.

I'm not sure if this is already a lost cause, judging from their appearance.

Last year I grew 1 cherry tomato plant successfully in this same location, so I decided to go for four tomatoes (2 cherry, 2 steakhouse) this year. This spot receives full sun for 7+ hours every day. The weather has been horrible. I kept them in pots until our last frost, bringing them into the house every night, but the cherry tomatoes (black cage) were already wilting by then. The soil was constantly very dry an inch deep so I watered them and their leaves would perk back up, but wilt again the next day. I made sure not to overwater but eventually they stopped regaining strength and shriveled. The steakhouse tomtoes (green cage) were doing just fine until I transplanted them 3 days ago. The moment I planted all tomatoes our weather has been unforgiving and reached scorching temperatures of 29-32⁰ C, so I tried my best to water them appropriately whenever the soil dried up. Their state has only been getting worse and worse, and I kept reading online and all I find it that I may either have been underwatering or overwatering them. I've been watering based on whether an inch of soil is wet or dry to avoid overwatering.

Their stems are still strong for the most part, but the leaves are doing very poor. The cherry tomatoes were green by the time the leaves started shriveling, and only 2 days ago started turning red so that gave me hope. The steakhouse tomatoes are growing every day, also hopeful. I'm really unsure what I can do to turn the tides here, or if it's too late.

I'm new to gardening, so I may be doing something very wrong here, but I have bell pepper, oregano, corriander and parsely, strawberry, and kale all growing very beautifully. The only plants that are failing are my tomatoes and I'm very upset since they're the ones I was most excited about. If there is any additional information, let me know, but otherwise I'd really appreciate some insight on what's going on and what I really need to do. Thank you!

 

[DingoBells]

An update, I have cut off most of the dead leaves as it seemed appropriate, but I'm not sure if this counts as "overpruning". There doesn't seem too much left on the cherry tomato and I do believe they're as good as dead, BUT they're still producing fruit and many are turning red!

The steakhouse tomato's fruits are growing large in size as well. I'm not sure how they are capable of producing fruit when their leaves are at this state. They're just wilted and won't open up again.

 

[Pepperhead]

I've heard that one trick at the end of the season is to prune all of the leaves so the energy of the plant gets focused into the remaining fruit.

 

[headfullofbees]

Tomatoes are climacteric; as soon as they start ripening, the plants are irrelevant to them.