Rimworld crashing with mods.

I see so many posts with people saying they play with 1000+ mods and never play vanilla anymore. My question is how? I have around 40 currently, mostly vanilla expanded and dead mans switch, as well as a bunch of quality of life, and I'm having a lot of crashes. I was playing with mods before but was having a lot so I stopped most of them and it fixed it, now it's happening again. Are there mods people use that improve performance?