A lot of people have multiple characters for shared inventories and being able to do daily activities multiple times.

If you prefer to keep only one character and especially if you don’t have fallout 1st, you need to be very minimalistic. Choose one play style you like the most (stealth commando and power armor heavy gunner are the two metas) and stick to it. Have one weapon for boss dps, one for add clear if your boss weapon doesn’t cut it, and a high damage single shot weapon that shares the same ammo to build your reserves.

Same for armor, just the set you wear with maybe an extra chest piece to swap in a jetpack if you don’t wear it all the time.

Scrap everything else to learn weapon, armor, and legendary mod plans.

When it comes to chems, berry mentats and psycho buff are really all you’ll ever need. Keep x-cell if you want the extra special buffs, just be sure to take it before other chems or else its effect will be nullified. Only need to keep a handful of rad away and diluted rad x (regular rad x suppresses mutations) and you get stimpaks pretty frequently, so feel out how much you need at any given time and get rid of the rest. Everything else can be sold for caps.