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 used MacOS exclusively for 8 months before making my mind up. The initial plan was to use it for at least one year but after 8 months I was really fed up and went back to GNU/Linux. I expected it to be better but in the end I found it was not, at least not for me. Although Apple invests a lot of money and effort in the MacOS user interface development I found it way too restrictive compared to any DE or window manager I used in past on GNU/Linux. I am not Gnome nor KDE user but would pick any of these two over MacOS interface without second thoughts. Homebrew is useful and commendable but far worse than any of the major package managers on GNU/Linux. Macvim was fine, but it did not have features I relied on in Gvim. I never used Safari because compared to Firefox the interface was clunky. I do not know about current Safari status but back then it didn't have extensions. I wanted to switch many times over the 8 months and was relieved when I did. To me, personally, Apple products are overrated. MacOS? No. But thanks.
I take my notes in org-mode with deft plugin and latex snippets. I have shortcuts for taking screenshots and importing them in the org document. I use blocks for gnuplot, octave, etc.
It is very powerful but at the same time slow. Every time emacs generates the latex bits it takes some time to generate and open the file.
There is also a little bit of overhead because it is a lot of elements and a lot of syntax to generate documents.
I am learning math so my org files are full of latex code, screenshots and graphs.
It is very powerful but I wonder if I am wasting my time into details.
Sometimes I think I should limit myself to text only, but I am not sure I can convey textually ideas that are better represented in picture.
Also, although I very much like emacs I find it very slow.
So...there is this tradeoff, either very complete and detailed but slow (emacs/orgmode/deft/latex) or very basic and simple but quick (neovim/plain_txt/fzf).
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.