I'm still on i3 as it's been convenient, but this:

this has all become very specialized over the past decade

resonates. I keep incrementally adding personal tweaks and hotkeys to my setup, and I have all my dotfiles in a repo so it's persistent across installations.

One example was I made my headphone button pause/play videos with i3's config:

bindsym XF86AudioPlay exec playerctl play-pause

But then I adopted a script to toggle mic mute on work Zoom meetings, so I combined it with the above - if I'm in a meeting it toggles mute, otherwise it play-pauses any current video. The script, for now:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Handler script for hitting mute on the headphone.
#

CURRENT=$(xdotool getwindowfocus)
ZOOM=$(xdotool search --limit 1 --name "Zoom Meeting")

if [[ -n "$ZOOM" ]]; then
    # if zoom is active, toggle mic mute
    xdotool windowactivate --sync ${ZOOM}
    xdotool key --clearmodifiers "alt+a"
    xdotool windowactivate --sync ${CURRENT}
else
    # otherwise do play/pause
    playerctl play-pause # will fail if no player found
fi

and of course I altered the i3 config to launch that script rather than playerctl directly.