Early Access and Mods

A good friend of mine and I had an interesting conversation over coffee this morning.

We were discussing the merit of mods in an Early Access title like Valheim and he mentioned not wanting to go back to Vanilla. In part, due to the updates being too far apart for a game that already has been out for a year and has 1 million players.

After finishing vanilla, he only plays modded Valheim and enjoys; more weapon variety, magic, enchants, changes in difficulty to mobsbosses, and the populated unfinished regions. But his server feels like another game, that being said, I am enjoying it, just seems different.

My argument is that I enjoy EA for new content updates, taking a break again, then coming back to the vanilla game and experiencing something new. While playing other games, I'm content waiting a reasonable amount of time to see what the Devs bring to the table while they fulfill their original vision for the game.

One important note, I am grateful for modders across all games I play, this is just an early access title, so perhaps that's why it feels different.

There are also games out of early access, and in constant development over a period of years, keeping the game fresh and expanding it's original content, while also being enhanced by mods. To me, this is a beautiful thing.

TLDR: Should Iron Gate simply have waited and released a full game, do you play with mods already?
Should mods influence early access developers?