Then they should be better. Nexus' monopoly is like steam's. They got it by just making a product that isn't a major pain to work with. (Okay all Bethesda modding is always a major pain but nexus has made it as tolerqble as it has been so far)
For other games with large modding communities Nexus Mods is often not the main site.
My favourite modding setup I have seen has to be Thunderstore with r2modman (initially Risk of Rain 2 modding, branched out to other Unity games), ridiculously simple and functional. All FOSS too.
Moddb was mentioned. Another good one is thunderstore. It all depends on the game though. Valheim (and several other units based games) is very active on both Nexus and thunderstore, stalker games tend to be moddb, &c. Nexus tends to be the main one for most games though.
I mostly like Nexus (paid member), but I share the concern about it being the only game in town for most games. Nexus is heaps better as a site than both moddb and thunderstore ime, but the lack of real alternatives is putting way too many eggs in the same basket.
Like it or not, it is golden standard. Streamlined like hell and makes getting into modding a childs play, both visually and mechanically. Only when you start going deep into mods does Vortex shit a brick.
They really should add option of unlocking manual order of mods and for me, that would be it. Sadly last I heard they said no.
Edit: Also you still can bypass automatic load order by entering manual value for mod, they do have that option...but I found it's behaving kinda quirky, so still would prefer simple drag and drop. Also uses 16 base which for most users will be offputting.
Also also you can add reqs to load something after something else, but that works as long as first mod doesn't need special place.
MO2 is just better in every way. It's visually simpler, less confusing and functions as you would expect - drop the mods in and swap the order how you please. Creating mod profiles is easy and it has very deep advanced setup if you need it. Vortex just causes unnecessary roadblocks and troubleshooting steps. MO2 (to put it) "just works", try it if you haven't, it solves all the issues you just listed.
Tried it. That's why I said Vortex is more visually and mechanically appealing. And from experience Vortex pretty much removes need of troubleshooting in most cases, unless you try to top off full blown overhauls and similiar.
Difference is, for experienced people MO2 seems better. But for fresh guys Vortex wins, by a lot.
Because it's nice to have options, and as we've seen time and time again, once a certain site/service becomes the de facto for that niche, it's all too easy for them to start squeezing their userbase for more money.
If you think Nexus won't go down that route (they have overall been pretty good to their users so far), there are still other concerns, like imposing restrictive rules, services going down, the site being sold, etc.
Yeah all of that is valid, but it doesn't really justify putting a mod on a platform that's objectively worse for modding and making a large portion of your users have an objectively worse time installing and managing all their mods. I would love for gog to step up and make a modding platform (and specifically mod manager) even close to the quality of nexus' but they haven't yet.
I agree that the situation would be better with more sites, but it's pretty clear this is a special case for GOG (I don't think they'll start hosting just any mod), and even if it wasn't, this mod won't be on Nexus, so the total number of sources for it would stay the same.
I wonder why they don't also host the mod on Steam (like SKSE for the original Skyrim). Also kinda weird that the GOG employee they interviewed used this project as an example of how GOG is different from Steam, when Steam has a long history of hosting mods...
I would wish if some standard mod download, update and collection API would be established, then having multiple mod sites where everything works slightly different, some mods are exclusive and you might have to pay each service separately for a fast download.
I have a lifetime premium nexus account, so I was there when the enshittyfication started, before it was great, now I see that newcomers have it more difficult there. But I am not sure that multiple competing mod sites will be better, because there is no standard API yet.
I would be willing to pay one provider, which pays for hosting and also gives some to the creators, but then I want to have full and convenient access to all mods.