For the variants I've programmed, I've enforced that they start with a random word guessed (same random word for everyone though.)
Wordle is good as it is but personally I think most of the variants would be better off adopting this feature.
That said I saw someone speedrunning 10x Xordle games and for speedrunning they just ignore the starting word and make the same 4 guesses every time: CARVE SHIFT GODLY WHUMP
Wordle sparked off sort of a global game jam around variants, maybe because it was such a wholesome project. And these variants have found players; there's a lot of people who play a whole bunch of daily word games, there's some youtubers, etc.
I've programmed 3; the way that went down is I was curious if an idea I had would be fun (two Wordles on the same board, sort of a mix between Wordle and a word jumble since you don't know which word the clues go to.) Since there was an open source implementation this only took me one night, and it was in fact fun and started gaining some traction as https://xordle.xyz
Then some game designer friends suggested their own takes and I implemented those too: https://fibble.xyz lies to you once per row, and https://warmle.org tells you if you're close to the right letter rather than if a letter is in the wrong spot which gives the gameplay a very different feel
This is what I do, just use some word. Don't care so much about the score, just to get it within the allowed guesses. Would be boring to make a recipe.
Wordle is good as it is but personally I think most of the variants would be better off adopting this feature.
That said I saw someone speedrunning 10x Xordle games and for speedrunning they just ignore the starting word and make the same 4 guesses every time: CARVE SHIFT GODLY WHUMP