A bit more backstory: There is a nut job wm for macOS called Mjolnir https://github.com/mjolnirapp/mjolnir that I got pretty deep into, and that left me with question: This seems to do all the things that people talk about with tiling wms, but it doesn't actually require any "tiling" features. That was maybe three or four years ago, and I'm still trying to figure it out.

That is useful backstory. Stating it up front would have let to more useful discussion!