What is your recommendation for a starter XR/AR/VR model?

It depends on few criteria starting with your budget, what you plan to do with it and what are your expectation on privacy.

Currently, in September 2025, the most popular option is the Meta Quest 3. It's a relatively affordable headset at around 500 EUR. Unfortunately it requires a Meta account which does have negative consequence on privacy. It can be mitigated by having an account solely for XR, not linked to any other account, e.g. no Facebook, no Instagram, no WhatsApp, etc. Most options relative to privacy should be explored. Note that since Summer 2025 it can be rooted and thus there is on-going work to make onboarding via a Meta account optional. This might aleviate most privacy challenges but it would still create a dependency on Meta.
A much more affordable option is to rely on an older version of the Meta headset, namely a Quest 2 or even Quest 1. They are powerful enough have an up to date browser. The Quest 1 is already end of life so will not receive security update. Consequently if purchased for a very low price, less than 150 EUR. Note that it will probably not be possible to purchase content for it.
There are more open alternatives, e.g. XR1 by Lynx, from France, but they are relatively expensive and hard to obtain. Note that the XR1 can be rooted with no exploit required. The Lynx has Wolvic (a fully open-source browser supporting WebXR) builds, even though oudated for now.
The Apple Vision Pro is extremely expensive and is tied to the Apple ecosystem. That is not a recommended option but it is also excellent for text.
If you do already having a gaming PC the Valve Index is quite outdated but works well under Linux and allows to support a company that is not promoting lock-in and produce amazing gaming content. Unfortunately there is no WebXR support on Linux except very experimental explorations. Consequently it is not recommended.

Last but not least the most important criterium in order to have a headset for this project, is WebXR support. The project is based on WebXR as W3C specification precisely to avoid being tied up to a specific vendor.

PS: what about upcoming headsets? Well the trend so far is that new headsets do come with WebXR support. The biggest change will be Google AndroidXR and it does officially support WebXR. Consequently all headsets running AndroidXR should work with this project.