First of all, you are absolutely right. Using your brain for actual work and not futzing around with configuration is always a great choice.
But honestly, the amount of mental energy the author seems to put into this is way beyond anything I would consider needed to use a tiling window manager. Just the base configuration with an application launcher installed is pretty much enough for most people.
And I have never in my whole live visualized the tree in my head. For me at least i3 is a simple and performance conscious way to use my small/old laptop screen, easily switch between the 10 virtual desktops and either use a stack or a side-by-side view. Sometimes I build a very, very simple tree if I use a ton of terminals at once.
I feel like these kind of 'I installed a new kind of desktop environment'-blog posts are just desperate for any kind of content that exceeds 'I installed it and fiddled around in the configuration file to adjust it to my keyboard and then it worked well enough. Over the next couple of weeks I kept adjusting small things to better fit my workflow. After a while I got used to the shortcuts. Oh, and I changed the background.'
This. The author is obsessed, but that makes it fun to read. I've been using i3 exclusively for close to a decade and never used a window placement other than 1-3 windows in a horizontal row; switching to tabbed layout when I want something fullscreen; and rarely, for specific applications, a floating layout. Rather, I use a lot of workspaces (16) and put windows in those that I expect to find them.
My point is, you don't need to use a WM/DE like others are using it, but how you prefer to use it. i3 is flexible enough to allow many styles, so choosing to use it might be mostly about whether you think it can cover your preferences.
But honestly, the amount of mental energy the author seems to put into this is way beyond anything I would consider needed to use a tiling window manager. Just the base configuration with an application launcher installed is pretty much enough for most people.
And I have never in my whole live visualized the tree in my head. For me at least i3 is a simple and performance conscious way to use my small/old laptop screen, easily switch between the 10 virtual desktops and either use a stack or a side-by-side view. Sometimes I build a very, very simple tree if I use a ton of terminals at once.
I feel like these kind of 'I installed a new kind of desktop environment'-blog posts are just desperate for any kind of content that exceeds 'I installed it and fiddled around in the configuration file to adjust it to my keyboard and then it worked well enough. Over the next couple of weeks I kept adjusting small things to better fit my workflow. After a while I got used to the shortcuts. Oh, and I changed the background.'