I use NPCC because it's the only thing that stops NPC spawning completely. For me, this mod is a must have. My favorite feature it has is the ability to disable shifts and region/lot dependency from jobs, allowing less sims to man all my bars, restaurants, retail, etc. Instead of having over 20 bartenders, I just have 2 to that work at every bar in my world. I haven't found another mod out there that does this, so it makes NPCC valuable to me.
Paulson did quietly release an updated free version (1.3.5c) though, so you shouldn't need to subscribe to his patreon to try it out. Link is on his website
here.