If all you want to do are some hobby projects and being able to leverage the existing Arduino ecosystem, there is always
https://github.com/stm32duinoIt has a healthy community
https://www.stm32duino.com and it's officially supported by ST Micro, for pretty much every processor and board. It's not as flexible as using stm32cubeide, but since it uses the same HAL libraries, it has the same performance as anything written with HAL (which I find cumbersome and wasteful). The HAL doesn't really abstract various processors, each one uses subtly different versions. If anything, stm32duino does a better job at abstraction
I have used both approaches, and I prefer going the stm32cubeide route (without HAL) when I need high performance, and stm32duino when I need to do something quickly and I need an existing library. For example, driving a touch LCD is pretty trivial with stm32duino, would take a lot of work using the native ST dev environment.