I've tried a bunch of free editors like Shotcut and Lightworks, but they always felt a bit clunky or limited unless you upgrade. For recording, OBS is solid and I’ve used it for everything from tutorials to quick streaming tests. If you want something simple for editing but still with enough features, I’d go for Movavi Video Editor-really easy to pick up and it doesn’t have that massive learning curve like Premiere or Vegas.
Also, if you end up messing with color effects or want to invert colors on your images, I found that using an image color inverter tool makes it a lot simpler. It saves a ton of time compared to doing it manually in layered editors.