I could not care less how popular tiling it is. What I care about is how good it is for my use case.
If tiling is useful or not really depends on your use case and your workflow. I would say that for you tiling does not make a better experience because your workflow and your needs are different. In my workflow and use case tiling is a better, and much more functional approach, compared to anything else I tried so far, including MacOS. I do not care about ricing, I use i3 with the stock i3-bar. I rarely see my wallpaper since all of my screen is occupied by programs I need to get my work done. I use rofi/fzf/ripgrep integrated in i3, Emacs and my terminal emulator. All of my configuration is tailored so I can automatize my workflow as much as possible. Tiling, in my specific case with i3, glues everything together very nicely. I tried to replicate the same thing in Gnome-shell and it was just clunky.
Anyway, the good thing is that in GNU/Linux you can choose how to shape your user experience. Tiling is just one of the ways you can do that.
I think it heavily depends on the kind of work you're doing.
I've used i3wm for the last 4 years, and it's very helpful for when you have a bunch of short-lived windows (like terminals) or you frequently switch between two different sets of windows (like docs/code, or code/web-app).
