Blender

Aside from the addons that come with blender (F2, Edge/ Loop/ Mesh/ Curve Tools, Node Wrangler, Import Img as Plane, Amaranth, etc.. ) I really like these for making simple tasks much easier:

Image Paste lets you paste an image from the copy buffer as a textured plane or image empty etc..

Waveform Display displays the amplitude of any imported waveform (present in the VSE) in the dope sheet. Really useful when you're animating with sound.

Sync Workspaces allows you to synchronize certain viewport settings across different workspaces. Must have!

Bulk Asset Tools for easier asset and catalog management without the need to open the respective asset files manually, if you want to sort and rename them.

Blender Launcher Not really an addon, but great if you want to download and organize different builds (no Mac version though)

a little off-topic, but I've noticed that it is impossible to comment here unless you specify the language in the dropdown. Maybe a bug on lemmy.world? (I'm on a different instance) It just shows you the 'wait for it' circle and everything you typed is gone once you hit cancel.

Machine tools is critical to all my worklfow. Can't recommend it enough.

UV Squares, still works with blender 3.6 too

https://github.com/Radivarig/UvSquares

There's a new(ish) free and open source addon for creating human characters: http://static.makehumancommunity.org/mpfb.html

There's an introduction video for it at https://youtu.be/9jmTdhVjAsI

Maybe not technically an add-on and self promotion, so please remove or let me know if it's not appreciated here. But I made a script for myself that monitors the progress of animation renders.

It monitors how many frames have been rendered, tells you the average render time per frame based on what's already rendered and gives you an estimate for when the render is done. It also (optionally) let's you know via Telegram once the render is done.

Originally I made it in batch but I remade it over the weekend in python so it's now cross-plattform. Github

Dynamic Parent is absolutely indispensable if youre doing any kind of interaction in your animations.

If this were a few years ago I'd say Animation Nodes but that technically ended a while ago and became our beloved Geometry Nodes.

This post I made has some free addons as well: https://blenderhub.net/free-blender-addons/