I sort of get the appeal of fine-tuning the terminal environment to perfection but after fiddling with such things for many years - decades - I ended up using mostly stock settings with a very few changes. The advantage of that approach is that I feel at home just about anywhere instead of just on my one or few customised systems. My customisations mostly consist of a local /bin directory with a few hundred scripts (wc -l now shows 263) I made over the years which I dump in a new environment plus a few additions to .bashrc (yes, bash, not one of the fancy replacements (zsh, fish, oil, ...) which are supposed to be better but in reality just end up being different) to set custom paths etc.

I landed on near the same thing. I also went too far the other way at various points: ed as editor, weirder shells (posix sh, rc, es, rush (ruby shell), pdksh), suckless everything (even on MacOS, where possible). I found my healthy balance between using more modern tools and learning the defaults to avoid too much configuration. I still have 281 lines in dotfiles (according to `git ls-files | xargs cat | wc -l`), along with my dwm.tmux[0] as window manager, but I feel like I can generally operate in most environments as long as base tools are present. If others haven't tried it, I recommend giving it a go. Try being bravely default.

[0] https://github.com/saysjonathan/dwm.tmux