The vanilla MacOS game should work fine. The mod system should be mostly isolated from the rest of the game in v1.0d, so certain errors like the backup folder will not break other things.
Mods are never essential for Strive, though they may improve your gameplay experience. There is a bugfix mod, which is basically an accumulation of changes until the next version. There are only a handful of mods(I'd guess about 4) that continue to be updated for Strive, though some smaller mods might still be compatible.