As an alternative to helix, there are lots of preconfigured/opinionated vim/neovim setups. Lunarvim (my choice), chadvim (I think is the name), and more.

All the benefits of the vim plugins etc. With sane defaults. You still have to take time learning everything, and I would probably recommend spending time with configuring a vanilla neovin config to understand how it works then jumping into one of these later, but I've found it saves a lot of time configuring and gives you a fantastic starting point.