I mainly do browsing and text editing with some gaming and only a little coding, and tiling is great for me. I almost always am either using fullscreen windows or two windows split vertically and it's so nice for that to happen automatically. I don't want to keep multiple programs open on one workspace, so not being able to push things behind other windows doesn't bother me, and when I do want that the scratchpad is perfect for sending a window off the screen, and being able to pull it back up as a floating windows in any workspace with a keyboard shortcut. Being able to use custom scripts and tools like dmenu and polybar sends the ability to customize it to your liking and make it look good to the next level (of course you can use these with any DE regardless).
I'm able to do a lot on the keyboard but I still use a mouse/touchpad. I feel like it's pretty easy to set-up logical shortcuts to do a lot of things you might want, but I'm not interested in doing everything from the keyboard.
Late last November after having used i3 on various occasions for only a day or two at a time and giving up because I something didn't work out of the box, I decided that I would stick with it at least until the end of the year. Even though using a tiling WM isn't the only reason/way to better understand how to cater your system to your needs, you're forced to here and it was a kick in the butt I wanted to have. In doing so, I learned how to fix issues that I was having with pulse audio and libinput (problems I never had in Budgie), and that makes me more confident I can solve the next problem that comes up. Getting a good baseline set-up for myself was pretty quick, and by mid December I felt completely comfortable.
I've since tried going back to Budgie (which I'd used for ~ 2 years previously and loved/still do) and even though I was able to use my dmenu scripts and set up most of my shortcuts, it's a huge pain to not have the auto tiling that i3 gives and I have to go back (I don't automatically send certain programs to specific workspaces, so someone else would have to speak to that)
