If you want to try you also can use hyprland as a stacking window compositor it is really clean. The one thing I would say is clunky is the configuration around hyprland xdg-desktop-portals are just a mess

It's a different mindset in switching to tiling window managers. I spent a good amount of time with herbstluftwm and bspwm under Xorg, and after awhile, things started to gel. Being someone who likes to tinker with my system, it allowed me to break away from the big, heavy desktops, and create something that works for my workflow.