Analogue simulation: Surge FX’s tape Calf Vinyl

Compressors, gates and equalisers: Anything by LSP

Limiter: x42 seems to be a clean and save limiter LSP seems to be more tunable and a bit dirtier and potentially louder.

Saturation and distortion: Several good options on surge fx

Guitar sim: Guitarix.vst (also includes a Neural Amp Sim host)

Synths: Surge Zynaddsubfx Odin2

Sampler: Liquidsfz DrumGizmo (very resource intensive)

There’s ofc tons of stuff I haven’t tried, but these work very well for me