Similar here too. I'm on the lazy.nvim train too because it's componentized, powerful, and scalable. It would take me ages to get all of the stuff going that Just Works™ (pretty much) OOTB. Yes, even Copilot if you're into that sort of kinky code completion sharing with OpenAI/Microsoft everything you type.
It was worth it to me because I never relied on many features of lazy.nvim. The benefit of the approach linked in the PR is that it also defer's loading packages as well. The only one I initially load is alpha.nvim (a dashboard), everything else gets deferred. This brought down my startup time from around 300ms to sub 100ms.
