...and all I hear is: "this stuff isn't ready yet" and "I'm going to be starring at Unicode glyphs the next time I have to tinker outside of my GUI".

This really isn't a zsh problem, but a "people putting too much stuff in a 'getting started' config".

I used zsh for 15 years before looking at any plug-in manager, you can get a lot of the good stuff like the completion by just going through the first-run wizard included in zsh. A lot of stuff is included directly with zsh, including various prompt themes (which is what that tutorial wants extra fonts for, because they use a fancy prompt with custom glyphs; I don't think any of the built-in ones need that)

Things like fuzzy history search with fzf is usually included with fzf's distro package and the additional zsh-completions package for less used or newer commands is also packaged by most distros. In my experience, a lot of the other plugins are stuff that could be a standalone script instead of a plug-in anyway.