This is a collection of all the mods I play with regularly. It's all very vanilla friendly. Mostly just Aesthetic, QoL, Utility, and Performance stuff. Good for Creative or Survival. Nothing dramatically changes anything about the game.

Below are pretty much all of the added features.

Aesthetic Stuff:

GREATLY improved render distance using LODs
'Amplified Nether' (Much improved nether terrain generation) (This does happen to eliminate the nether roof, so you might want to delete this one if that's important to you.)
Nonessential parts of the hud go away when unused (configurable)
Thrown and handheld lighting items give off light
The camera moves a little in reaction to player movement
Ability to customize menu screens
Extra player animations
Smaller bees
Smaller nether portals
Better sound physics and ambient noise
Some other minor stuff

Game-altering Stuff:

Creepers have a small chance to spawn charged
Husks and strays can spawn naturally
Craftable saplings
Taller world height
Pets teleport with the player
Terraria-like ability to auto sort items into nearby chests
Ability to move tile entities with items inside
Some improvements to mob AI / abilities

Utility Stuff:

Xaero's world and mini maps
Shulker Boxes and Bundles can be accessed in the inventory
Freecam
Custom macros
'Mouse Tweaks' (new shift-click-esque abilities)
Pinnable notepad / to-do lists
Optifine-style zoom
Abillity to see saturation levels
Gamma booster (Toggle)
See a list of the pets that are following you

Boring Utility Stuff:

In-game mod config menus
Better customization for controls
'Searchables'

Creative Modey Stuff:

'WorldEdit'
'AxiomTool'
'Litematica'
'World Drag'
'Better Command Block UI'

Performance / Optimization Stuff:

'Iris'
'Lithium'
'Sodium'
'Bad Optimizations'
'Dynamic Fps'
'Entity Culling'
'Immediately Fast'
'Clumps'

Resource Packs:

'Vanilla Tweaks' (minor improvements here and there)
'Fresh Animations' (animates entity models in cool new ways)
Some improved sound effects

Simon's Essentials