i've played hundreds of hours modded and unmodded. whiterun is a safe place for me. well, and windhelm a bit. i love the vibe of the world (maybe because i grew up in a very cold place) and i can turn my brain off when i'm exploring caves (since they're all very similar, or i've already done them). i even like the easy-ass cave puzzles since i don't play the game to think.
to me, skyrim is like modded minecraft, it's chill and familiar and i can just wander around and listen to the soundtrack (also i just learned about the 42 minute Skyrim Atmospheres track on the OST and now I measure my activites in "number of Skyrim Atmospheres")
but i have trouble with the combat. i think most recently i had fun with a 2h weapon. i hate the magic and while i used to be able to stealth archer everything when i was young nowadays its super frustrating because the stealth system gets more "realistic" and less fun if you do any kind of modding of the combat system, and actually clearing a room as a stealth archer even in vanilla can be an exercise in quicksave/reload (maybe i'm just bad idk)
tbh, the most fun I had was on the switch when i bought it again (damnit todd), and i'm not sure modding was really worth it. i got starfield for free with a cpu i bought and didn't make it past the elevator because the game ran so badly on my computer. i did watch a semi-playthrough of it and it didn't seem like something i'd like. i kept trying to get into no man's sky and i bounced on it for some reason, and i think it would be the same for starfield.
idk, it just clicks for me every couple of years and i get obsessed with it. when i was young my dad surprised me with a copy of oblivion one day randomly and i played the crap out of it but hated the level scaling etc. skyrim improved on that in some ways - the level scaling feels less punishing in skyrim. i also couldn't figure out how to level up in oblivion (i was 12 or something), so skyrim was an improvement there.
oblivion was still better than ultima 9 though for me (though i still have a cloth map for that), ask me how i lost multiple days to the tutorial tower in that game...