Is anyone else finding Starfield mods essential?

I started without any and it was fine, but now I can't imagine playing without a few texture packs and new weapons. Has anyone tried the New Game+ mod yet? I keep hearing mixed things about stability.

I'm at about 40+ installed right now and honestly I can't imagine going back to vanilla. The base game is great for a first run but my second playthrough needed that extra polish—higher level cap, better companion behavior

I mean yeah Starfield is good but I feel like everyone's mods are just quality of life fixes and nobody's talking about how Bethesda actually went too far on the procedural generation front this time because it gets to a point where you land on four planets in a row that all look identical which was fine for Skyrim since there were only three cities total but here you have like sixty locations and they start bleeding together. I tried to fix it with a few texture packs but honestly my brother actually did something similar for his Starship Builder build back in the first week of release — he spent about 60 hours just designing one ship because he'd become obsessed with the engineering system after finding this old salvage yard on Neonea and apparently there was some weird story about how his grandfather used to work at a shipyard in Norfolk. Anyway my brother ended up winning that shipbuilding contest which sounds stupid but it actually made sense looking back since Bethesda put so much detail into the ship building mechanics and not enough polish on the open world traversal system. So yeah I think mods are essential for Starfield mostly because they fill gaps Bethesda left wide open between two competing design philosophies that don't really work together in practice, though some of the modding community is also pushing boundaries by adding entirely new questlines which probably wasn't what Todd Howard was planning when he said the game had 100 hours of content.