> One of the first walls I hit was “how the heck do I navigate files in a project?”
Simple, just use or :Ex. Netrw, which provides the :Ex[plore] command, is a file explorer with a hell of a lot more features than NERDTree (browsing remote machines, for example) and comes with Vim. There's no need to install anything unless you really want something that is not in netrw. :h netrw
I second CtrlP. I love it. And both Syntastic and EasyMotion are pretty useful. Those plugins are worth checking if they solve a problem you have; otherwise don't bother.
But all those blog posts, always listing more or less the same plugins, may inadvertently make new/non Vim users believe that it's impossible to open files efficiently or do this or that with bare Vim which is rather unfortunate and… blatantly false.
Most of the time it's hard to say if the author knows about Vim's built-in navigation methods and decided to use a plugin instead or if he never took the time to learn them and just went with the most popular plugin out of ignorance and laziness. Like… if half the message was missing.