I started playing Skyrim Special Edition back in, oh, March of 2021?  And I think I started adding mods immediately.

When I learned of the impending Anniversocalypse back in mid-October 2021, I was having severe problems with CrashToDesktop-on-Save (CTDoS) with my last (81st level!  550 hours!) character, probably because I'd just oozed into mod-using and just kept playing whist figuring out what mods I liked, and UNINSTALLING THE ONES I DIDN'T (this is Very Bad).  It's amazing it lasted as long as it did, really.

I had merely allowed Steam to place Skyim where it willed; and if it updated, I'd have to either give up a substantial and unknown number of mods or *shudder* play without any mods at all!

I decided that since I'd have to fiddle heavily with moving my already-kind-of-dodgy installation, and start a new character anyway, I might as well dump everything (except screenshots) and start over fresh, and try to do it better this time.

Anyway, I'm playing with four MAIN principles (and some lesser principles) in mind:

1.  It's My Computer.  I paid for it, I pay for electricity to run it (and cooling in the summer), I built it, I have to repair it.  NO ONE ELSE does any of these things.  No one else PAYS for any of these things.  If a program is under the mistaken impression that IT owns my computer, it may get killed and removed, because I HATE YOU AND WISH TO CAUSE YOU PAIN AND SUFFERING.  I utterly hate all programs and companies that assume THEY own MY GOD DAMNED COMPUTER.  This is Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple for their hardware, Android, Intel, NVidia, AMD, Chrome, Firefox...  I don't want to contribute to their database of use-of-their-product or errors-in-their-product; I don't want to participate in their marketing research survey; I don't want to be (and I'm not getting paid for) advertising THEIR product.  They didn't ask, and the answer is "NO" anyway.  Fuck all of them.  I'll uninstall, delete, block, and firewall any shit that I feel like, and find alternatives and hacks and hot-wiring and jury-rigging and plain ol' not use it, because IT'S MY FUCKING COMPUTER.  If their program can't handle not being allowed to track my every keystroke, rummage through my files, and copy everything that might be interesting back to their Evil Lair HQ, then fuck their program and fuck them with a slow dull rusty chainsaw.  Starting at their feet.  
2. It's A Game, It's Supposed To Be Fun.  If it stops being fun, I could be doing other things, and I could use the computer storage space.  So, grindy elements that I find to be torture -- like 'no fast travel' or 'no fast travel out of dungeons' or 'make ten trips back to town to sell the loot I find in one dungeon' -- are Right Out, because F That Nonsense.  If I really don't want it to happen, I'll make it not happen, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.  That's not threatening you, unless you're a game designer who thinks that making players 'grind' (do repetitive tasks that honestly are exactly the sort of things computers are better at than humans, never mind that it's all inside a computer game anyway) is a Good Thing to put into a game because of reasons.  It is not, and I have a special set of needles just for those, to stick into their eyeballs and tap-tap-tap into their skull sinuses.
3. If The Game Cheats, I (Get To) Cheat.  Out of three times I've done the Vaermina quest already, the door inside the chapel (that goes to the dungeon) has failed twice.  I've heard that Windhelm's Blood On The Ice is crippled as well.  These are vanilla quests.  (Why the hell, Bethesda...)  If I find a mod author has forgotten to finish the flooring in some area by falling through it and getting trapped, I'll turn off collisions and fly back to where I want to be.  If I can't get through a door I'm supposed to, I'll turn off collisions and go through it.  If someone dies and they shouldn't have, I'll resurrect them.
4. This Doesn't Make Sense / Why Can't I Do This In Game When I Can In Real Life? My suspension of disbelief is old and needs new springs; it bottoms out very easily.  This drove me to distraction in Kingdoms Of Amalur - you have exactly 70 inventory slots, and you can only buy 10 more at a time, at specific vendors, once each per vendor, max 130.  It doesn't matter what goes in one slot, except for the exceptions (10 potions per slot, notably). You also can't drop anything - only sell it, destroy it, or once you unlock a player home you get one chest to put things in -- and there's a limit on the number of things you can store in it (and it's a common storage space, so you get ONE chest no matter how many homes you've unlocked).  You sit down exactly one time in the entire playthrough with DLCs, and it's for maybe a minute; you can only sleep certain places; I don't think you ever need to eat, drink, or sleep; there are things in inventory you cannot get rid of EVER; enemies die and have weapons and armor RIGHT THERE that you can't take; the world has invisible constraining walls...

So, Modded Skyrim For The Win!!

Also, a fifth (and lesser) principle: I have limited time to play.  If you think I want to spend twenty minutes struggling to deal with the effects of your mod, you're wrong wrong wrong.  If you think I appreciate having to run through five loading screens and three minutes of corridors and stairs to get from Useful Point A to Useful Point B, you're wrong wrong wrong.  Doing the trip once is okay, for exploration, or to show off the paintings you put on the walls or your awesome tunnel textures or whatever; after a few times, all I feel is anger at the waste of my time.

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General Game: Special Edition via Steam for Windows, pre-Anniversary Update (1.5.97), no Creation Club content

Computer: AMD something-or-another 8370 4 core ~4.0-4.15GHz max not overclocked, 24Gb of RAM in 4 slots, 

Video/GPU: NVidia GTX 760 with 4Gb VRAM

OS: Windows 10 (hiss!)  I hate Microsoft, and have hated Microsoft for decades.  Why am I running it?  Because my SO is a whiny shit, is why.

mod manager: Mod Organizer 2

I followed Lexy's LotD Guide for a lot of my before-my-mods setup; you should too, except for most of the specific mods if you don't want them.  I have kind of a potato computer, so I just ignored a lot of her graphics improvements altogether, and only use Cathedral Weather and Seasons as an ENB (Enhanced Natural Beauty).  But the rest of her setup instructions are golden.  I especially liked making 'fake mods' in MO2 (which are just sub-folders or subdirectories) to store the output of various helper programs like Bodyslide; this is brilliant, and easy to do if you do it from the start.

I also organized my mods into categories this time, which makes it MUCH easier to find them and order them.

You should probably follow The Method.  I didn't, because I have very little patience, but I can see that It Is Good.

Body: CBBE 3BA

Animations: FNIS (necessary for creature sex) plus DAR 

I followed the excellent guide to using FNIS alongside Nemesis, but then decided that since I needed FNIS that I didn't want the extra complexity of Nemesis also.

DAR seems like its animations enhanced Everything Else, so I had to put that in.

Notable mods:

WARNING:  I TOLD YOU THIS WAS A PERVERTED PLAYTHROUGH; I WASN'T KIDDING.  

It's going to have lots of sex, nonconsentual sex, prostitution, some BDSM, overly-large breasts, lactation, bestiality, tentacles, spiders, cannibalism, drugs, and I've got a children-are-killable mod too.

Of course, the original game has cannibalism, Mephala's Ebony Blade, Boethiah's pillar, mind control (or at least very limited dialog choices and some un-avoidable quests) and the 'hero' is someone who basically kills everything alive in front of her/him as a default behavior (which I heard described as "murderhobo"), with options to become a vampire or werewolf, join the assassins' guild, and to give victory in a civil war to either racists or religious crazies.  I'm not batshit-loony enough to think that sex is worse than mass murder. (I'm not going to kill /all/ the children...)

Notable Sex Mods:
Creature Framework and Aroused Creatures and... lots of animations covering a wide variety of creatures
Kyne's Blessing / SexLabs Parasites
Submissive Lola
Milk Mod Economy
Devious Devices though not Deviously Cursed Loot
TDF Prostitution And Pimping, AND Radiant Prostitution, both
Player Succubus Quest, Succubus Heart, Sucubuss [sic] Layer, AND SexLabs Deadly Drain Enhanced - this is because I really suck
one or more of Defeat, Naked Defeat, and/or Yamete
Simple Slavery Plus Plus

Notable Non-Sex Mods: (though I might still get fucked by these mods...)
lots and lots and lots of clothing
Heel Sounds (I got addicted to the clop-clop-clop-clop, okay?)
LazyOutfit
Try My Outfit
Tropical Skyrim Overhaul
Cathedral Weather (also an ENB, kind of)
Alternate Perspectives (an alternate start mod, alternative to Arthmoor's AS-LiveAnotherLife)
Apocalypse (magic modifications) and More Apocalypse
Animated Wings Ultimate
Vitality (kind of Survival Lite)
some of Mihail's monsters
M'Rissi's Tails Of Trouble (played a bit of this to make sure it was working, like that tells me anything)
Beyond Skyrim Bruma (never played this)
Wyrmstooth (never played this)
Legacy Of The Dragonborn 
Moonpath to Elsweyr (never played this)
Vigilant/Glenmoril/Unslaad (never played this)
Complete Alchemy and Cooking Overhaul (CACO) and the dozens of patches for it
Complete Crafting Overhaul Redone (CCOR) and ITS dozens of patches
Weapons Armor Clothing & Clutter Fixes (WACCF) and ITS dozens of patches
Inigo
Lucien
Skeever 
Nether's Follower Framework
Way Of The Monk
Valravn (combat 'overhaul')