For me, I really want to get into niri, but the lack of XWayland support scares me (I know there’s solutions, but I don’t understand them yet).
Also, I stopped using Emacs (even though I love its design and philosophy with my whole heart) because it’s very slow, even as a daemon.
This really isn’t a zsh problem, but a “people putting too much stuff in a ‘getting started’ config”.
I used zsh for 15 years before looking at any plug-in manager, you can get a lot of the good stuff like the completion by just going through the first-run wizard included in zsh. A lot of stuff is included directly with zsh, including various prompt themes (which is what that tutorial wants extra fonts for, because they use a fancy prompt with custom glyphs; I don’t think any of the built-in ones need that)
Things like fuzzy history search with fzf is usually included with fzf’s distro package and the additional zsh-completions package for less used or newer commands is also packaged by most distros. In my experience, a lot of the other plugins are stuff that could be a standalone script instead of a plug-in anyway.