If there's any desire for more immersion by way of ambient animals/mobs and wildshape/polymorphed characters, I highly recommend the combination of ModelEngine, MythicMobs, and LibsDisguises. They require some fairly robust initial setup, but they can be incredibly cool as an end result. I can personally help with setup and/or with creating custom models to use with modelengine, if needed!

I haven't worked with these in around a year, though, so my experience is going to be with older and now outdated versions, but they were for a 1.18.2 server and would function here even as such.