Are there any tools that you recommend to use with the setup?

[cdinu]

I am a requirements.txt person and try to upgrade myself to use pyproject.toml

Looks like everyone says poetry is needed to manage pyproject.toml projects.
Is this mandatory, optional? (in your experience)

Are there any other utilities I should have when using templates such as this one?

[paddyroddy]

There are a million different build tools https://stackoverflow.com/a/64151860/7359333. I've always used setuptools but feel free to use whatever you want. Personally, whilst poetry seems like it could be good, I've seen enough issues of when poetry has "broken" because some package didn't specifically support it - so I have no plans to use it. If you look at the Python documentation they show you how to do the same thing in Hatchling, setupools, Flit, PDM.