What's special about niri? Asking as a happy user of i3 for... I can't remember how long. It's one of the few pieces of software I don't have to think about, it just gets out of my way.

Actually, the only situations where I think about it is when I'm driving a mac or a win and the window management gets on my nerves, although I'm generally a pretty chill guy.

It's a scrolling window manager, so almost a completely different paradigm (that I find superior) to normal tiling WMs. Ironically the entire scrolling WM craze started with the PaperWM Gnome extension. I still use it, it's great.

i3 is really hard to move on from. Everything is the app and configuration you want since it doesn't have traditional "desktop" suite of apps, so by design it is literally built for your exact wants and needs. Same goes for fluxbox/openbox setups imo