Actually, the bare minimum Strength to use the strongest bow in the game, the reflex recurve bow, is 6. The Strength to get the reflex recurve bow’s maximum range is 12. If your Strength is below the draw strength for any bow, the only penalty is that you lose two tiles of range for each point of Strength you fall short of the bow’s draw strength. A reflex recurve bow has a default range of 18 tiles, so with a Strength of 10, its range is 14 plus the range of the arrow.
Strength 10 is perfectly viable for an archer, even if your goal is to wield a reflex recurve bow. With metal arrows, a Strength 10 archer still gets 24 tiles of range out of a reflex recurve bow, and bows have enough Dispersion that you wouldn’t be very likely to hit targets at a range of 25+ even if you had enough Strength to get that kind of reach. You can still get a range of 30 with a longbow and metal arrows if you really need it, and you probably won’t unless you want to try something crazy like shooting a turret with arrows in broad daylight, or if you keep finding that your reflex recurve bow doesn’t have the range you need to hit deer or whatever (but even with Strength 12 or a longbow you probably wouldn’t be able to hit it very reliably at 25+ tiles, and the chance that you’d do enough damage to kill it with that shot is even lower).
Bows lacking mods is still kind of a thing, but it’s getting worked on. Bow sights and bow stabilizers got added, and the latter is a godsend, because it reduces Dispersion.
It’s also true that you can wear bows in a pinch, but try to avoid doing so if you can. They apply high encumbrance to your torso (2 or 3 points) even before taking layering penalties into account, unlike anything with a shoulder strap, which has a base encumbrance of 0 and will only up encumbrance if it triggers layering penalties.
