I find it funny that it seems like any conversation about a particular tiling window manager will eventually turn into a conversations about window managers in general.

So to continue the trend, I used to use tiling wm's until I learned about Emacs. Emacs lets me do away with tiling mostly because it itself supports it in a way, namely C-x 2 and C-x 3. I can run all my shells and gdb's right inside Emacs. Nowadays I usually either have one fullscreened Emacs window, Firefox, 1 external terminal, and maybe LibreOffice open on my laptop. I don't mess around with moving them around and resizing them. For me, it's enough to simply have workspaces to manage all of them (I use C-M-[np] to switch back and forth through them, Caps Lock is remapped to Control).

It's true though that the benefits of tiling window managers isn't just the tiling itself, but often that they're programmable and configurable through plain text files. There's also the benefit of lower resource consumption if you run it bare.

As for what I actually use? Xfwm4 gets the job done.

As well as using C-x 2 and C-x 3, I've started using perspective.el (https://github.com/nex3/perspective-el), which means I can switch between different projects each with their own buffer set and window configuration, as well as switch to an IRC perspective. It's such a well-executed extension, definitely recommend it if you've never tried it.