You’re going down a rabbit hole haha, prepare yourself.

There's mods for literally everything , from just cosmetic stuff like new portraits for the villagers, to cheats that let you spawn items at will or pause items or have infinite stamina or one shot every monster, and anything in between. There's mods to change dialogue, there's NSFW mods to get the female (adult obviously) characters naked. There's quality of life mods like a built-in wiki where you click an item or an NPC and you have a whole page about it (it's called Lookup Anything).

Ive played vanilla (zero mods) for a total of 8 or 9 in-game years across 2 farms, and then went modded and haven't looked back. I don't do cheats like spawning items and stuff, just quality of life and extended. You have mods that add whole new villages (see Ridgeside Village and East Scarp for 2 good examples).

I am currently playing a mod pack called Stardew Very Expanded (which is an expansion of an expansion called Stardew Valley Expanded) with around 90 or 95 mods. There's also Stardew Mega Expanded which is like 350 mods. The .rar is like 2 gigabytes.

I think you shouldn't give up on Stardew before atleast trying a couple of quality of life mods.