As a fellow Atomic user, my completely biased opinion is that you’ve made a good choice of distro for switching from Windows.
Don’t sweat the need or desire to layer a few packages. I see a lot of folks stress over this as if it’s a hard rule they are breaking. It’s a general recommendation and little more. I would be surprised if most users don’t layer at least one package (or even a few).
On my main workstation, running Kinoite at the moment, some of the layered packages include: