I'm losing my mind. Not a single mod seems to work.

Coming back to Skyrim after maybe 7 years, I was already confused when I saw that there were mods for Special Edition and standard edition, and then even more when some of the mods I installed asked to select if it was AE or SE.

Also, I saw that SKSE had some issues with the version I'm running (1.6.318), and there was a lot of debate about downgrading the version of the game, but I just googled some version of SKSE that would work with it.

Fast forward to a whole day of downloading mods with Vortex and when I try to start the game, of course it crashes before even getting to the loading screen. I troubleshooted it and it was skyrim cloaks that was crashing the game when the unnoficial patch was also enabled (???).

Nice, we can get the game to start! Wrong, it crashed when starting a new game, without generating a crash log: neither trainwreck nor crash logger would give me anything.

Then I disabled everything and decided that the best way to troubleshoot now was with just a mod to skip the intro. I tried Live another life, alternate perspective and optional quickstart.
NOTHING, WORKS.

Live another life and alternate perspective just send me to the normal start, optional quickstart won't even get me to the loading screen, after pressing to start a new game it just stands there, soft locked.

I'm losing my mind here and about to just shift+del everything after wasting my whole sunday trying to get this to work.
Any insight at all is welcome, thanks in advance.