I tend to do the opposite of you and beyond looking at what a developer specifically lists as incompatible with their mod like to be liberal with the mods I try. I like to switch up mods every two or three weeks clear them all out refresh my ksp install and pick my base mod list plus anything that's recently updated or that sounds interesting. There are so many amazing developers working on mods that I like to give as many of them a try as possible although like you I avoid some that make drastic changes unless I try them stand alone in a separate install. If ksp has recently been updated I like to fork some of the repositories on git and poke around in them see if I can fix anything until the regular dev gets around to it and overall just admire their work. It was really fun when the last Unity update was integrated and entire reference paths changed that some of the mods relied on like for example the previously mentioned scatterer bug with the sun that impacted a number of mods despite only showing as uncaught errors in many of them due to the mod not actually caring about the sun, I learned a decent amount about the structure of KSP, the mods and Unity, however I don't always have time for that due to my obligations in life so I have never tried to actually contribute to the conversation until recently.