I've never played Skyrim

I would not do mods your first play-through. However, what I would recommend, is just doing whatever it is you feel like doing when you play. See a cave you want to walk into? Do it. Did you get assigned a new quest that looks more interesting than the one you're doing? Hop on it. Don't let certain storylines drag you down if you don't enjoy them.

Holy shit, I thought I was alone in the big gaming world!

The reason I never played it is because at the time the game was out, my PC couldn't handle it, so I gave up after my sad attempts to sit through the unplayable frames. And by the time I upgraded, there were simply too many games to steal my attention entirely - that's how it been ever since.

I want to play it, though. I never considered it boring - I liked it even when I wasn't that interested in fantasy, and now I'm gravitating even more towards it. Hope to get my hands down to it one day, but with Starfield (hopefully) coming out this year, and with The Outer Worlds to beat before that happens, I think I'm not slaying any dragons any time soon.

I have spent probably hundreds of hours in Skyrim at this point, but I would say the most fun playthrough I did was actually on the Nintendo Switch. I think that I enjoyed it because I didn't stop every hour to install a bunch more mods, since that wasn't an option (and I guess having it anywhere was nice too...).

If you want a bit of a smoother experience, I would recommend SkiUI on PC and Alternate Start, but I would also suggest trying it vanilla too as it can be a bit prickly to get SKSE (requirement for SkyUI) set up if you've never done it before.

I don't recommend doing what I did and installing 200 mods, finally getting it all working and then not actually going back to the game. Do we really need 12 million K textures?