A lot of the mods outside of VT+ were not updated for newer systems in the game by the original authors, though there have been people who updated the mods on their own to be compatible. For now I would suggest sticking with the VT+ mods, outside of ARK.
The reason your new/loading options are freezing right now is because in that version of the game there was a bug where adding/removing a mod that wasn't there during a previous save would cause the game to try and call for information that didn't exist before, thus freezing at that screen. You will have to delete the saves in the installation folder to fix the issue. If you are using only VT+ mods though this will not be an issue, as some of the work I did actually fixed the bug for those mods.