As a developer who deploys wordpress often, I can tell you that if you have the resources (experience and time) to setup a headless wordpress you probably don’t need 99% of plugins. The really important ones (ACF Pro, cookies-stuff, SEO etc) are compatible with headless.
I regularly deploy non headless high impact wordpress sites with about 6 plugins max. Theme is custom developed as a skeleton starter plus custom fields.
I feel you though, it’s imperfect but so far I haven’t found an alternative for client work especially that beats the WP ecosystem
This sounds like it's worth a blog post. I'm sure lots of folks, including me, would be interested in the details of which plugins to maximize utility, and what the deploy process looks like. Cheers!