I somewhat recently settled on using use-package and straight — I highly recommend this approach. You can get pretty far using what comes with emacs and adding a bit more.

You can see how I do it in my emacs config[1] but it's a little bit special with meow[2] for a colemak keyboard. There's a youtube channel that I've skimmed[3] that helped me modernize my config by relying more on emacs' basic features.

[1] https://github.com/green7ea/dotfiles/tree/master/.emacs.d [2] https://github.com/meow-edit/meow [3] https://www.youtube.com/c/SystemCrafters