Went with great GM. I don't know that you can actually declare someone a "Star GM, guaranteed to build a contender", there are too many unknowns and possibilities to say a GM is building a surefire contender. That said, Yzerman is great because his hits have been home runs and his misses have had a limited impact (if any).
Drafting: He's knocked it out of the park here, building one of the best pools of young talent in the league. And that's with terrible lottery luck too. Don't see how he could have done much better here. He seems to have hit with all the picks a rebuilding team can't afford to miss on (top 20 picks).
Trading: He's brought in a lot more value than he's shipped out. Whether it was a trade to move out a player with value like Hronek (netting ASP), a trade to move out a player with limited value like Mantha (netted us Cossa), or a hockey trade to bring in a good established player like Debrincat, Yzerman has come out ahead in his trades far more often than not. There's literally a meme of Yzerman on the phone with the caption "Stay calm, this is a robbery".
Free agency: This one's a little more of a mixed bag. We've all discussed the Chiarot, Copp and Holl signings ad nauseum so I won't get into that in much detail. But I'd say Holl is the only one he should not have signed at all. 1-1.5 million less per year to Chiarot and Copp and suddenly those contracts look decent. So the net 'damage' is a couple of contracts overpaid by a million a year, big deal. If we were contenders and every million of cap space counted, that's one thing. But at this point we haven't been limited by cap space to any significant degree, and there's a good chance all those contracts expire before they cause any problems. And to say a word in defense of Yzerman here, I can see the logic in what he was doing. He wanted to raise the floor of the team by bringing in some proven vets. And he clearly accomplished his goal there, with the team a point away from missing the playoffs. Now the young talent will progressively replace these players over the next couple seasons. It's really not a terrible situation with those contracts, all things considered. Then on the other side of the coin, you have the good signings like Kane, Perron, Compher, Tarasenko, etc. Barring slight overpays and a bad signing, I think Yzerman has dealt with free agency about as well as he could have, given the available options.
I don't think any GM would have done a better job in Detroit since 2019 than Yzerman, and I wouldn't trust any GM more than Yzerman going forward. I'm not going to quibble about the little things, he doesn't have a crystal ball. But his mistakes are small and his successes are big, sooner or later that's going to lead to success. I don't know about anyone else here, but I'm still 100% bought in to the Yzerplan.