If you don't want to use a distribution like Doom (which I don't fwiw and I've been using emacs for 20-something years), then I'm a big fan of minimal-emacs [1] a compact init.el and early-init.el that configures vanilla emacs into a good, default state. From there I would pick and choose which packages I'm interested by going through the Systemcrafters's community [2] as others have mentioned and Reddit's r/emacs community. While Systemcrafters is a fun community I'm a bit reluctant to spend too much time there because it's more of a tinkering community than a day-to-day-usage focused community. Fine if you want to tinker all day with your config but not the best for getting work done.

One thing I urge you to remember is that unlike neovim, Emacs isn't about just enabling and disabling plugins. Emacs is a Lisp environment. It really comes into its own when you program it. To that effect, I would read through the GNU Emacs info manual. Emacs ships with its manual in its inbuilt info reader and you can also find it in HTML [3] by GNU. Try not to think of your emacs as a constant soup of plugins and instead a codebase that you manage. The environment is very amenable to introspection, and there's inbuilt commands like `describe-key` and `describe-function` that pull up documentation for elisp. I'm a fan of the `helpful` package which I find to be a better version of `describe`.

[1]: https://github.com/jamescherti/minimal-emacs.d

[2]: https://systemcrafters.net

[3]: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/