These are the mods I always use when playing minecraft to have it feel more modern while staying true to the vanilla experiance. I use mods that bring modern animations to mobs, objects and the player to make the game feel more alive then what the base game offers. I also use mods that bring performance fixes to chunk generation and even ram optimization to fix the games weird stutters that can happen on modern / beefy hardware. Lastly I use quality of life mods that add much needed features to the game (i.e. backpacks, double doors opening with eachother, removing the too expensive prompt on anvils, nerfing the steep costs on anvils when adding enchantments to items, and being able to put enchantments from other items to a book via the grindstone)

