> 3. Curseforge's website and modrinth both seem to be legit places to get mods from. I personally find the installable Curseforge program itself to be bad and spammy, and would never use that, but the site still lets you directly download the jars you need, and lets you check "Dependencies" to find out what other mods you need.

PrismLauncher, a popular MultiMC fork, has direct integration with Curseforge and Modrinth, while being completely ad-free. Best of both worlds.

A few mods are not available because Curseforge allows mod authors the option to force ad monetization by blocking API access, but these are few and far between.