I used i3 for a 4+ years, then a few months ago I got tired of the screen tearing when I scrolled in Chrome and the screen showing a frame or two of checkerboard patterns (actually it's more complicated, like black pixel fuzz around text that used to be there) any time I resized or moved a window. Now I just use the built-in Ubuntu desktop environment (tried the Wayland version but Spotify and Discord don't work). Since most of the time I just have a terminal, Chrome or Emacs in full screen it doesn't even matter.

Starting compton (which seems essential for i3 but the documentation doesn't mention it) didn't help. Enabling some Intel drivers fixed the screen tearing but broke my multimonitor setup.

Also dmenu is garbage compared to program search in modern desktop environments, it's just search for bash commands, half the results arent something you'd want to run from your desktop and it doesn't learn.

It makes sense that it's not popular, most people have better things to do than read a manual and learn a new configuration language with 100s of options just to move windows around.