I was used to pine and pico so I migrated to alpine and nano. Alpine works fine for me, alpine is very much like pine. I have spamassassin tagging mail as spam, and I have an alpine filter that moves those tagged messages to a possible spam folder.
I was used to pine when mutt came out, so I always used pine or alpine. You can check both out and see which you prefer.
I wrote a console-based mail-client with lua-based scripting, over at https://lumail.org/ but I don't think I have more than 50 hard-core users. It seems like most people use mutt, and work around its annoyances, or use web-browser for their mail.
(I realize at some point notmuch came out and became popular, but I've never had a strong feeling for how popular. I think I'm a little biased since I read of people using it, but nobody "local" to me does.)