Words with three vowels are a good starting point...

Actually, I disagree with this. If you like this as an opening tactic, then start with either ARISE or RAISE. They're the 3 most common vowels; O is less so, U not even in the top 10 letters. But many 5 letter words contain no more than one vowel (BITCH/DITCH/WITCH); some none at all (SLYLY). A better starting strategy is 4 consonants. TREND is good, as is STERN.

On a dictionary sort, (depending on your dictionary; what follows was done on the 1995 Concise OED), the top 10 letters are E, S, I, A, R, N, M, T, O , D; the 10 most common initial letters are P, H, C, B, D, R, M, T, A, F. A textual sort is no good because it's biased by common words like THE, WHERE, etc. Frex, W is the 6th most common initial letter, but only the 22nd most common otherwise. Remember Kipling's "Six honest serving men"!

But also remember! Well, two things actually... First, those frequencies are based on full dictionaries, not dictionaries of 5 letter words. Prefixes & suffixes will affect the order. How many 5 letter words start pre- or anti-? ;-) It's not perfect, but the best guide you're likely to get. When it comes down to it, Wordle runs off a limited subset of 5 letter words; if memory serves its (fixed) list is some 2,500 out of some 13K in total.

Second, when it comes down to it, just like the lottery, any given letter (number) is just as likely to appear in any given random moment. What I mean is this: If the lottery has drawn the 1 ball 5 weeks in a row, it doesn't mean that it won't appear this week. It still has a 1 in 49 (or whatever the probability is) of appearing. If you get S***E on Wordle, SLOPE or SCORE aren't more likely to be the word of the day, but they're more likely to give you a clue than SMOKE if they're not. When you get to SHA*E... There's 7 possible words there. SHARE & SHADE are no more likely than SHAVE or SHAKE!

And also, apart from the US word list (which reduces the frequency of U even further, because ARMOR / FAVOR etc can appear...), I have never seen a plural. BONUS is valid, NOTED was my 1 on Dordle today, but whilst STONE will be in the Wordle list, I don't expect to ever see NOTES...

Hope this is of some help to you hopeless addicts. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! ;-)