I agree I think a lot of people do tend to go overboard with the plugins they add to Neovim. I only use a hand-full of plugins myself; Telescope for fuzzy finding, LSP for navigation and Rainbow-delimiters. I've found attempting to add anything "un-neovim-like" such as tabs or a debugger to be more of a hassle and jankier than just using something better suited to that task.
I actually think the best way to learn Neovim is to build your own configuration with as little plugins as necessary for you to get the job done because it'll force you to learn the Neovim way of doing things. For example instead of relying on tabs I learnt to use the Mark system and it was a great addition to my workflow.
I was in the same place you were a month ago but I decided to just bite the bullet and build my own Neovim configuration from scratch. Fortunately I don't use auto-complete and an LSP was only a recent addition to my configuration. Telescope was one of the few plug-ins I configured off the bat and when you start small learning the eco-system isn't that much of a hurdle.
The Nvim Kickstart Project is a great starting point for your configuration and has it's config file heavily commented to teach you how to setup your own configuration, I highly recommend it.
I actually think the best way to learn Neovim is to build your own configuration with as little plugins as necessary for you to get the job done because it'll force you to learn the Neovim way of doing things. For example instead of relying on tabs I learnt to use the Mark system and it was a great addition to my workflow.
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