I have been using straight for a while now and I think it is great! The ability to lazy load everything by default does a lot to make Emacs snappier (or at the very least, faster to boot). Being able to pull packages directly from git (be it local or a forge) makes package development a lot easier. raxod has a lot of really sleek, modern emacs packages that I would encourage everyone to check out, selectrum[0] and ctrf[1] in particular are really great as well.
[0] https://github.com/radian-software/selectrum
[1] https://github.com/radian-software/ctrlf