It's... been quite some time since I've played Minecraft, so I'm pretty out of the loop when it comes to server mods and whatnot. As the title more or less states, I'm trying to keep things mostly vanilla, which leaves me wondering:

1. Is there much point to using Spigot and/or Paper if I'm trying to keep the server very close to vanilla? In other words, do they improve performance, fix bugs, etc, or should I stay away from them for vanilla because of larger overheads for mod support?

2. What would be considered good quality of life mods for a mostly-vanilla server? I'm really hoping to only add things that would still allow me to drop my world back into a fully vanilla server when updates happen so that we don't have to wait for Spigot/Paper/Mod updates, which inherently means no custom blocks, items, etc.