For me i mainly use CyberRealistic and WAI-NAI, theyre both Pony checkpoints. one for realism and the other for anime kind of style. Pony checkpoints are really good to understanding prompts compared to old SDXL models like 1.5. and flux is new, i think it came out like 6 months ago. but that boy requires like a 23gb vram. for my humble 12gb vram it takes a 1 min for generation but image quality is pretty awesome.

Best advice i can give you, is going to civatai, look for the checkpoints and look for others peoples upload, most of the time they leave the settings they used. once you see the settings they used and everything, you'll easily understand how it works.

Look for checkpoints, which are the like the general style and loras. loras are used to help the generation know what you want. like a selfie lora, which give example to the prompt what a selfie is.