As long as Mod support is up for this game, the game is going to hold up very well against many RPGs of today.
Kudos to all the modders out there.
Without mods, the game is perhaps the weakest amongst the Elder Scrolls franchise with a very bland story line and hardly interesting NPCs. The combat mechanism feels clunky at times,the difficulty is hardly anywhere near challenging ( you will see dragons more as free crafting resources than an all powerful mythical beast wreaking havoc to hours of your game play. The game is also ridden with several quest bugs, though many have been fixed with patches. It gets quite repetitive and mundane past say 30 hours into the game.
Its only through the tiresome efforts of the modding community, wherein people sacrifice their sleep,work and what not to rinse free this game of its shortcomings , many of which should have been the duty of the developers themselves but they are apparently too busy taking Skyrim to a new platform( maybe your refrigerator in a few months?) or churning out cash cows like Fallout76.
Vanilla Skyrim : 2/10
Modded Skyrim : 7.5/10

My suggestion to anyone going to try it for the first time would be to go through a rapid initial play-through , interacting as much with the world as possible and then modding the game as per your tastes. You will find tons of guides regarding the same on steam community, Reddit, Youtube. etc.

The game is definitely worth having in your library but mods are a must. Even if you dont want to ruin the vanilla experience, get the fixes for bugs and performance enhancers.