I used to like KDE and dislike Gnome, but by the time I switched to i3 I realized I don't care about traditional window managers. I used a lot of console anyway. Why wait for windows and icons to appear? I want animations and decorations to get out of the way. If I'm playing, it's usually fullscreen. When I'm working, I want to use as much screen as possible. i3 sounded radical at first, but when was the last time an animation or decoration helped you? I mean there are some rare cases, but it needs to be helpful for me to leave it enabled.
I now honestly believe mouse interfaces are overrated. They have their place in games and graphical applications. Anything that does NOT require precision is better done with a keyboard. The exception is websites. Mouse is used because it has very low learning curve and you can just click on stuff that interests you without thinking how to reach it.
Aren't tiling window managers the traditional ones?
The ability for one window to float over another was a later innovation and is of course more difficult to implement. The earliest versions of Windows were also tiling only, which is thus the traditional way.
Sounds plausible.
Note there's a big trend of making fullscreen applications. Skype acts like you bought a computer just to run it. Slack wants it all. Gmail is crammed with icons and features and can't deal with half width screen. Media players have notions, they call your computer a library.
Instead, many applications subdivide themselves into smaller windows - for example IDEs.
It's as if people gave up arranging application windows. They alt-tab (switch) between fullscreen apps. Moving windows around is usually too much hassle. Unless you drag and drop some files from one folder to another, but even then many people prefer copy/paste.