Honestly man, depending on how long its been since you played, the modpacks may not have changed super much. There's a few standouts every year or two but its gotten a bit stagnant.

Gregtech NE is less a game and more of a lifestyle choice as you've kinda noticed. Monifactory is super similar and still a hell of an undertaking but will take you dramatically less hours to progress (still a lot). If you want to go simpler than that, I was a big fan of Stoneblock 4, it mostly revolves around one giant fairly interesting multiblock structure that you upgrade over time.

I pick a big kitchen sink pack like all the mods and make sure it has the tech mods that I like. I prefer to play on servers so I am limited to what packs are available on what servers. Last pack I played was All the mods 10 which was pretty good.

What kind of mods do you like? Are you an exploration person? Do you have a preference for any minecraft version?

Don't be afraid to try making your own modpack. There is a little bit of a learning curve if you've never done it before, but you could probably finish this in a single afternoon if you simply don't let yourself go too crazy with the number of mods.

Get yourself a big-name alternative launcher like Modrinth (which I prefer) or Curseforge and then look through the mods that support either Neoforge or Fabric and settle on a Minecraft version with the mods that catch your eye. So long as you try to avoid having multiple mods that affect the same things, most mods will just work together out of the box and only require some minor tweaking of the config options to feel good. In the case that the mods you've installed just aren't cooperating, a mod like Crash Assistant might be about to help you out as well as forums like this one, but the best method is just to disable half the mods, test, and then disable another half until you've narrowed down the culprit.