Same. Consult in general has a bunch of great utility functions that are well integrated with the Emacs core.
I'm looking into dropping Vertico after I upgrade to 29. It's almost incredible that Minad's user focus and humility make that a potentially reasonable option, and I really appreciate the fantastically sound design of his completion ecosystem.
I used doom without evil a few years back and it was fine. I moved on to a custom config, but that wasn't so much because of dissatisfaction with doom as a desire to more fully understand what my config was doing.
Even if you don't intend to stick with doom it's worth checking out just to get an idea of what's possible and how it might be accomplished.