It's not cheating either since most of the changes make the game harder. For example, Project Nevada changes many of the core components of the game, but it's extremely customizable and I consider the majority of its changes a great improvement over Vanilla New Vegas.
There are many great mods as well, but this is where you get into tricky territory since many of them alter core components of the game. OP, get Nexus mod manager (it's not the best mod manager, but it's the easiest for those new to modding). It fixes soooo many bugs and problems without changing anything about the game itself. Like, There's not even a single downside to downloading some of the mods, such as Yukichigai Unofficial Patch.
There are mods that objectively improve the game.
