Drupal is a very flexible CMS, and you can make any website in Drupal. But, you need a lot of work to initially set up an appropriate Drupal base for your project and a lot of experience to know which contributed modules are stable and good to use. Currently, Drupal doesn't offer as much as possible out of the box (this will change in a newer version of Drupal, version 10, in the following years).
That's why there are a lot of Drupal distributions that offer a well-prepared Drupal base with already installed and pre-configured modules. This is a very good approach and can speed up the Drupal site-building process. But, the problem with this is approach is stability. You need to find a good distribution that has regular updates and follow Drupal core and modules updates as soon as possible. For example, some contributed modules can have a bug that has been solved in a newer version of the module, but your distribution still doesn't have support for this version of the module.
The second approach is to use a default configuration. From Drupal version 8.7 you can install Drupal from the default configuration. This is similar to Drupal distributions that use installation profiles, but after this kind of installation you will have no dependencies with default configuration, so you can update any module to the appropriate version if you want. CONS of this approach is that you will be responsible for any further update and bug fixing (applying patches) if something is broken.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to use our default configuration and set up a good Drupal base for your new site.
You can find our default configuration on Bitbucket repo (it's open-source so you can clone the repo and use it in your projects)
You can find instructions on how to Installing Drupal from existing configuration in our tutorial too.
Update with more information regarding our default configuration will be available soon.